A small jumping spider hopped on my hand the other day. He looked at me with wide eyes, tilting his small head curiously. He crawled along the mountain ridges of my knuckles and across the spiral river beds of my fingertips. I watched him still, then pounce on a fly nearby–nearly his same size–and munch on it in victory. I built a wall to shield him from the wind as I carried him to the tree in the yard.
“Oh, but he might bite you!”
“He is too small to bite me.”
“Good thing he landed on you. He wouldn’t be alive if he landed on me.”
But for what? A millennia of evolution, bipedal apex predator smashes the smaller, why? Because she can? The spider eats the bugs that bite at me, and I punish it for existing? Because it’s body shape, many eyes, or many legs are so foreign to me I must destroy it because I am only comfortable with the familiar?
Daily, I am reminded that there is a whole world around me, below me, above me. Ecosystems and processes that I only understand vaguely but quite literally keep the world balanced. Six inches of topsoil that provide life to those walking above it, and a society of six, eight, and many legged critters that keep it healthy. A mycelium network that aids in arboreal communication and nutrition. What would my world look like without them? Would it even exist? We share a responsibility to care for the collision of our worlds and it seems as if those small creatures are better stewards than I of the gifts Earth gives us and my reciprocal response.
Bless that the Universe shows us the mercy we don’t give the bugs. Bless the bugs for forgiving my ignorance.
Scientist Seeking 
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