I’m sixteen years old, lying half in, half out of my sleeping bag on the dock at our family’s cottage on Marble Lake in Quincy, Michigan. By the glow of a July full moon, an orb-weaving spider is connecting one of the dock posts to the rough wooden edge of a plank with a diagonally dropped silken strand, on her way to filling in the space with that familiar spoked wheel design the night’s gnats can’t resist. I’m lucky enough to catch this one-arachnid show from just after the overture, and don’t plan to budge until she’s settled into the sticky spiraled center, upside down and patiently waiting for dinner to arrive (you do stuff like this when you’re sixteen, because you’re romantic and unemployed and on vacation with your parents). I’m also grateful to not roll around much when I sleep; a night spent on the dock of a marble quarry-turned-lake can be a rather wet affair if you’re prone to acting out those flying dreams you have.

It’s one of the most cherished memories from my youth, watching with unbridled curiosity and gathering wide-eyed respect the painstaking process of such an effort from start to finish, knowing that by the first lights of dawn most of what she spun would be shredded and torn, and she’d have to make a new one for her next meal. I have never worked so hard to put food in my belly; I doubt I ever shall.

In the past year’s more or less daily walks, I’ve clumsily barreled through at least a dozen of these gossamer creations, taking a few of them full on the face like a mask, blinking madly to disentangle my eyelashes from the gluey threads that crisscrossed my face. Always regretting it, always wincing because I know what it took to construct those meal-catchers. I don’t know if the web’s architect was dragged along for the rest of my steps or let go to save herself, grumbling at my overlarge thoughtlessness. I only recall deep regret that had I been more attentive, we all might have come through that leg of the morning’s journey with both of our universes intact and unbothered. If spiders use profanity, the air across the field is thick with it when I’m out and about, guaranteed.

The topic of impermanence has come up a lot in my conversations with Patrick lately, and it covers considerable ground between the sublime and the ridiculous. I suppose we’re trying to make sense of the growing whack-a-mole dangers and catastrophes continuously bubbling their way through our daily lives (sometimes it’s just not possible to ignore the news) and find even a modicum of consolation that both pleasure and pain will exhaust themselves with cyclical regularity. The trick is where we choose to place our philosophical starting point (so far, that’s still a moving target. No “once and for all” yet). We’re both learning to shift our outlook toward the more optimistic, with slowly plodding results. It’s just so hard to trust your current vantage point when threats are flung at you fast and thick from every direction.

And then we see the fields strewn with webs of all manner and style—the spoked wheel ones that are sagging with dew but still intact (there’s a lesson for ya); others resemble gauzey fairy hammocks and don’t appear to have ensnared a single stray or distracted mosquito, not one, in the dark expanse of night. Small and humble, big as Thanksgiving serving platters, snagged on a nearby iron weed stalk, it makes no difference. As the sun rises and sends its shafts of light down through them all, it’s nothing but enchantment and other-worldliness. We can’t look away and so we don’t. We know most of these creations and their owners will be gone for good while we go about chopping kale for our evening salad or sweeping leaves from the front porch. It’s easy to forget they’re out there, these little relatives of ours, setting their tiny legs and instincts to spinning another one from scratch. Again. How they don’t explode in anger and frustration I’ll never know.

And that’s the difference between spiders and me. But if they’re still willing to get up tomorrow and teach me, the least I can do is show up for class.