Recommending Love

I am so glad I love spiders now. I used to hate them, and fear them, but now, I think they are fascinating and beautiful, and it's feels so much nicer to love them than to hate them. Today I was having one of those days where nothing goes the way you want it to, and I was frustrated and annoyed. I went outside to do my bug walk, frustrated and annoyed that it was so dark and cloudy, figuring I wouldn't find anything today, and I found a spider, and it made me happy. I felt happy because I had found a spider, and when I thought about that, I felt happy that a spider could make me happy. I used to feel repulsed when I saw a spider, and depending on the circumstances, afraid. Most of the time I would kill it, unless it was a huge spider, and then I would be too afraid of it to kill it, so I would have to get someone else to do it. I would even kill spiders if I saw them outside, and there was no call for that, they weren't hurting me, they were just living their spider lives, keeping insect populations under control, so what was the point in squishing them? There was no good reason for that hate and fear, nothing that spiders had ever done to me to earn my malice toward them. What, because they're creepy, and have eight legs? They might bite me, and then I'll die? Well, for the most part they can't kill me, but I didn't know that. I really didn't even know much about them. But that is often the way of hate and fear; we don't have a very good reason for it, and we may not even know very much about the subject of our hate. But I learned about spiders, and I learned not to hate them and (mostly) not to fear them. I learned to admire them, and I learned to be happy when I find out while I am outside looking for bugs. And it's so much better to look at something and feel love and happiness instead of fear and hatred. I know it's not just a matter of deciding not to hate anymore, though it would be nice to be able to do that. But maybe it is a matter of deciding to know more about things, and to be mindful of why we feel what we do. Because maybe there is no reason for our hatred after all.

Don't worry, the spiders are still at the end of this post.

The deep freeze last week seems to have killed the early-sprouting snowdrops before they could bloom, which made me very sad, but new ones have emerged, and if we don't have another deep freeze soon, may actually get a chance to bloom!

 

It might be weird to have flowers instead of snow in February, but they are snowdrops.

I didn't see a great variety of bugs today, hardly any, but I did see a LOT of one kind of insect:

 This is just the kind of weather for seeing springtails, and they were everywhere today.

 

 There's two kinds here, the round ones and a couple of snow fleas.

 I saw one winter firefly, and that was it for insects today.

 However, as you know I did spend some time enjoying some Arachnid Appreciation:
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