On a textured sage green popcorned wall, a creature with eight hair-thin legs and a small dot-sized body centered the card I pulled from the deck of other miscellaneous imagery. Who was this little guy? He wasn’t a Halloween decoration heebie-jeebies type of spider but more of a friendly in-the-corner-of-a-old-kindergarten-room kind of spider. Spiders have often been used in media to represent bad omens and invoke fear, but I would like to take a different perspective of this spider in particular. Out of the 43,000 spider species out there, only about 30 of them are actually dangerous–so why give them a bad rep? What seems so scary and creepy-crawly, at the end of the day, is just a small creature whose only crime is being a little spooky.
When I was younger, I had only known spiders to be creepy crawlies. My mindset changed the day I saw the movie Charlotte’s Web; that was the first time I felt empathy for spiders. For anyone unfamiliar with the film, it follows the story of a pig named Wilber who becomes aware of his purpose of becoming food and teams up with a spider named Charlotte to help keep him alive by showing how amazing he is through messages she writes through her web. Spoiler alert: the end of the movie, when Charlotte ends up dying, absolutely destroyed me, and I remember sobbing so much the first time I watched it. I had terrible anxiety about death as a child, and this may have been the original trigger but who knows, I can’t remember. As an adult, I find comfort in what happens after her death, when Wilber helps take care of her babies until they all leave except for three who stay behind with Wilber. Charlotte’s story doesn’t end with her death, and Wilber is proof of that, passing along stories about her to her children.
I know it’s a children’s film, but the personification of this kind little spider who held on as long as possible to help her friend really left a mark on me. This fearful pig learned how to process death and accept it as part of the cycle of life through Charlotte. I was too young and anxious still to realize the bigger message being sent back then that it was meant to teach me. The lives we live will someday become precious memories that the living will pass on after we are gone. It’s important that we live in ways that we can look back on fondly and to be proud of the legacy that we leave behind.
*Inspired by my childhood memory of this film that pretty much invoked so much anxiety in me, I decided to write a poem for Charlotte in memoriam. R.I.P. queen, you were gone too soon.
Comentários