We’re back in London and the garden is full of spiders. They have been left undisturbed and spun their webs thickly across the narrow space behind our terraced house.

Webs got tangled in my hair as I walked out to marvel at which plants had grown and which had died during the weeks when this place was left to its own devices. The apple tree has crumpled under the weight of the fruit, the hops hasn’t climbed over everything as it did last summer, and the spiders are even more plentiful than last year.

I counted at least seven of them, big, plump London spiders who must have put such a lot of effort and toil into spinning their webs. We swept most of them away with a broom and now they have taken up residence somewhere else.

Hopefully they had feasted on flies and other insects while we were away as now is the time for us to reclaim this space, otherwise it would be difficult to make my way to the shed where I write and work when my son is in school.

Spiders were on my mind earlier this summer season as well, when I was in Finland picking blueberries in the forest. Every morning I got up while the rest of the family slept. This was my time.

Many mornings the sun was up and the air smelled of pine needles and damp moss. And many mornings the spiders had woven fine webs across the blueberry bushes. At first I brushed them aside to pick my berries, but as I spent more time away from the city and more time in the woods I changed my ways.

The spiders had just as much right to gather their food among the blueberries as I did. I started to take more care where I walked, I started to try to avoid the spiderwebs as best I could. I didn’t want to undo someone else’s hard work.

I started to slow down, to listen, to be amongst all the other beings and creatures who were and are and live in the woods around our summer home.

I picked berries and put pine needles and raspberry leaves and yarrow in my tea. I sat on the veranda of the old house in the forest and just listened. A lot came my way when I sat there.

And that’s the way of the spider. There is toil, there is work as we weave our webs, and then there is the waiting. Sometimes we find ourselves in a season of waiting. The trick is to know when and that’s where something like astrology can help.

At the moment all the outer planets are retrograde. This is the season of waiting, of mulling things over, of going back over our plans and retracing our steps. One by one the planets will be turning direct, but the real rush and flow forward won’t happen until February 2025.

So this is the season to sit with the webs we’ve already spun, to re-weave the threads that might have broken and to see what appears, what we catch in our traps and what thoughts spring up in the stillness. Before we know it life will start to happen again and we will be busier than we can now imagine.

Wishing you all a lovely spider season.

Photo by Sam Valdez on Unsplash