Summer, Struggle, and a Spider's Thread

There is a sweet patio on the first floor of the complex where I live.  It has a small lap pool and a few tables and lounge chairs; flowering trees and rosemary shrubs surround it.  This spring/summer the pool is empty, except for a small pile of dirt and leaf debris collected at the deep end.  I've been hoping it would be up and running soon, but there is an unresolved technical problem.  So today, on a glorious Sunday morning I decided to take a book, a pillow, a glass of water and go down and sit poolside even though the water has gone- missing.

The book in my hand by Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, was published a couple years ago, in 2013 by a non-profit educational organization.  Their mission is to "nurture holistic views of arts and sciences, humanities and healing".  I recommend it to anyone on the path of healing body, mind, spirit.  In the midst of the chapter called Struggle, a thought ran through my mind mirroring the content of the book: "maybe someone else is out doing something more important today to make our environment better or someone else is helping the homeless, maybe that is more evolved than hanging- out reading about changing the world".  With my head more or less in the self-flagellating clouds and exactly at that moment, a hummingbird appeared nearly in front of my face, totally exquisite in form and vitality.  

Eisentein's overview of our current Cartesian dilemma: "[i]n tracing the deep roots of ...programming, ...contained in our basic scientific paradigms.  Not only in Darwinian biology with its struggle to survive, but in physics as well with the doomed and endless struggle against entropy...we reside in a hostile universe in which we must over come natural forces and carve out a realm of security and apply force to impose our design on a purposeless, disorderly jumble."

The hummingbird grabbed my full attention to the perfection of the moment.  I was overcome with a short blissful knowing that maybe the try-harder mentality of self-judgement or competition; conflict, feuding with, straining against, harsh grinding daily responsibilities to produce; jockeying for attention in the work place world; efforted labors, wars, and the ugly rest of it, is unnecessary madness. Eisenstein's point is that we might seek to "look for the unmet need that drives the desire" to do these stressful things to ourselves and put demands on one another with all of the aforementioned campaigns of troubling addictions to our conflicts. His reasonable line of argument being that we claim less struggle in our choice of words and actions when we "address the unmet need directly, it no longer drives the desire that has been so destructive."

As I sat by the empty pool, something I have been resisting for two months- struggling against the gone- missing water and "why don't they fix it"- I noted the heavenliness all around me. A blue sky, all the elements in balance, a slight breeze, a swallowtail butterfly fluttering about, a hummingbird speaking directly to my thoughts and something else overhead. The sunlight hit a single horizontal line so thin at first I did not realize it was a thread of a web, high above me at the second story level, crossing a span between two trees about fifteen feet apart. Remarkable. The thin silvery line moved with the breeze, swinging higher and lower above my head.  I was transfixed with it, as birds flew over and under it like a gossimer jump rope.  It was insubstantial and yet clearly physical enough to be visible, catch the light and strong enough to hold.  Nature never ceases to amaze and inspire me.

How was this possible? What if the effort of the spider to span the distance was no effort at all? What if there was a joyous floating oneness that drew the filament across the space? An invisible "right-effortness" that was neither hard nor a struggle but rather painless.  Is it possible that all of nature is showing us that each day, rather than the "no pain, no gain" mentality that we tend to live by?
Eisenstein says, "[w]e all wrestle the same demon in a myriad of different forms." Be it an empty swimming pool or alcohol, we all struggle and we all desire connection, self-love, easy earthly pleasures, maybe it just takes a leap of faith from one tree to another to find the sweet spot.