"It's that time of year when Grandmother Spider blesses us everywhere we go. In the fall, everywhere I go in the forest, in my home, grandmother spiders, they're weaving their web, preparing for the winter, celebrating the summer, having babies, building nests like crazy. When you walk through the forest in the morning, you walk through a lot of spider threads and webs. And you say thank you, grandmother, thank you for that blessing, the blessing of connection.

"I was told this by an elder, Carol, with whom I went to Ireland on a rekindling indigenous spirit trip in May 2008. She was raised by her mom's people, who were Navajo or Lakota, but her father was Irish. And she was on the trip to connect with those Irish roots.

"On the trip, she kept saying to me, you have a lot of spider medicine. I was the trip recorder, documenting the trip and having the conversations, storytelling the city and the circles, and putting images together. That's spider medicine, she said.

"And so, spider medicine continued to guide me in my ‘spoonful of honey’ project, in Toronto, which involved holding storytelling circles between elders and youth, people from all different backgrounds and classes and neighborhoods, held together in a circle with creative art, food, storytelling - intergenerational relationship building. We passed a stone with an image of a spider on it."

I remember when I was making this stencil it was the warm spring months, and beautiful Nootka roses were blooming, and cotton wood fluff was in the air, and there was a young man hanging around at our Inspiral collective, Lenny's brother, visiting from Australia, and he was a little punk rock kid who traveled the trains across Canada and America, and documented it and I guess you could call that spider medicine, traveling trains since he does that all over the world. I had started this stencil at Inspiral, and as we had a little romance, I happened to be cutting out the grandmother spider with her eggs. Grandmother spider is like the primordial beginnings of this story. This creative story called life. This creative event called love.

"And now here's this beautiful flag of the spider hanging in the fall sun, with both light and shadow.  Grandmother spider brought us the first letters and language to speak the story out aloud and to write the story down and to weave the story from person to person, mouth to ear, ear to mouth, heart to heart. The fabric of the flag is a thread, woven together in bright colors by many people's hands, and the threads fly on light beams in the wind and connect on the prayer stream. SO, that's my rambling grandmother spider medicine story. Here she is with her egg sack and it's like the universe is being woven around these eggs, which are in turn the seeds of the universe. Each seed, a little baby spider and they’re going to come out and make a lot of webs and then have their own babies and the story goes on…"