What If You Saw a Wolf Spider?
Just Stop Screaming and Equate It With The Tao
I’m not gonna lie, I’ve never been one for spiders. Creepy crawlies and I have a mutual understanding—stay out of my way, and I’ll stay out of yours. But life has a funny way of challenging our comfort zones.
When a Carolina wolf spider sighting popped up on my Fort Collins Reddit feed, I couldn’t help but be intrigued. After all, if I’m ever to achieve the true Taoist ideal of going with the flow, I might have to make peace with these eight-legged Zen masters that skitter and slither through the dark corners of our world.
This Reddit thread was a mix of horror and reverence, the latter being something I never thought I’d feel towards a creature that looks like it crawled straight out of a nightmare. The comments were oddly enlightening:
Spiders are our friends,” one user chirped. Another pleaded, “Please don’t hurt her,” as if the spider had a right to its life lessons just as much as we do. Then there was the final voice of reason that almost won me over completely: “Definitely let her be. She is just doing her thing, eating pests and spiders that you actually don’t want around and can harm you.”
That last bit? It made me feel about 4% better about one day potentially seeing one of these creatures.
Turns out, the Carolina wolf spider—“Hogna Carolinensis” if you want to get all formal about it—isn’t just the largest wolf spider in North America. It’s practically a spiritual guru in the world of arachnids.
Picture this: a light brown predator with darker patterns, lurking across various terrains, from deserts to the suburban sprawl, fulfilling its cosmic duty of keeping insect populations in check. In other words, in a world overrun with pests, they’re the unsung heroes of ecological balance, practicing the ultimate Taoist principle of effortless action.
But there’s more to these spiders than meets the eye (or eyes, in their case, all eight of them). Wolf spiders, like their Carolina cousins, evolved from web-spinning ancestors millions of years ago.
Somewhere along the way, they realized that sitting around waiting for food to come to them wasn’t their style. Instead, they embraced the chase, taking life head-on, or in their case, head-first. They embody the yin and yang of the natural world—predators and prey, creators and destroyers, all wrapped up in a package that makes most people reach for the nearest shoe.
From a Taoist perspective, a spider’s web is a metaphor for life itself—a complex, interconnected structure that weaves together the threads of fate and destiny. Every strand is a decision, every intersection a consequence.
But unlike us humans, who often get tangled up in our own webs of worry and doubt, the spider just rebuilds. Over and over, with patience and perseverance, it spins its silk, embodying the resilience that we all could learn from.
I’ll admit, the idea of a spider weaving my fate is a little unsettling. But then again, isn’t that the essence of the Tao? To embrace the things we fear, to find harmony in the chaos, and to recognize that even the most terrifying creatures have their place in the grand scheme of things.
Maybe the spider doesn’t just symbolize creation and destruction; maybe it’s also a reminder that sometimes, we need to let go of our fears and trust the process. After all, it’s not the spider’s fault that we’ve been conditioned to see it as a threat. It’s just doing its thing—being a spider, being present, being, well, Taoist.
So, the next time I see a spider skitter across my floor, maybe I won’t want to whack it out of existence. Maybe I’ll take a deep breath, channel my inner Lao Tzu, and remember that spiders, like all things, are part of the natural order.
They’re just following the Tao in their own eight-legged way. And who knows? Maybe, just maybe, I’ll find a little bit of enlightenment in that moment— that is if I don’t holler first.
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Diamond Michael Scott aka The Chocolate Taoist
We’re lucky enough to share our home with quite a few species of spiders (well, the outside of our home that is!). I’ve evolved my thinking on them as well. One day, a web builder was spinning her web in a place that I could watch the entire process—not only was it fascinating observing the intricacy of that innate instinctual product, but I felt also a growing admiration of the faith each spider must have that what they are doing, in spending so much time and effort in building the thing, that the thing will reward them at some point with a meal. Spiders, like all life, have the same life force within them. Humans could learn a lot from spiders on patience, fortitude, diligence, wu wei, and, indeed, faith. Oh, and Zen.
“Never kill a spider!”
I once shared a room with a wolf spider in Thailand for a few weeks. And I mean it was a big one. Actually, sometimes it would go over into the bathroom as well and I always had to be quite aware of what I was about to sit on. At first, this completely freaked me out, after a while, I somehow integrated all the things you wrote about! Mostly because I had to. The thing was as big as my hand when my fingers were spread out, so the idea of trying to capture it was not realistic. In the end, she turned out to be a pretty good roommate and we gave each other quite a bit of distance. But my goodness what a process to get to know each other!