Perhaps it’s all the decorative spider webs around or the fact that it is spider season and there are actual spider webs all over right now, but then again maybe it’s just that I ran through one today which has me thinking about them. My first thought was that there was a statistic that came out in the 90’s saying that the average person swallows 8 spiders a year in their sleep. It turned out to be an experiment to demonstrate how gullible people are, and it worked as the statistic spread and is still widely promulgated. The reality is that we don’t swallow in our sleep so it’s not very likely we would swallow anything much less a spider (to answer your question, “no I did not swallow a spider while running today.” Though that does not mean I haven’t before). My next thought however was about how the web is such a great metaphor for so many things. Nets and webs inspired things like the Native American dream catchers and they are a common image that we relate to situations we are stuck in, to the things that bind us together, to the hope that as we cast our net we might catch something, to “the tangled web we weave” which might come apart or get us stuck and any number of other things.