The Mantis

A few days ago I looked out on the deck of my Patio and saw the largest Pray Mantis I have ever seen. As I watched it, it started walking up towards me. I bent down to take a better look at it (through the patio door). It was such a beautiful creature. It stood there, watching me, almost face to face, inches from one and another with nothing but the glass separating us. As I stood there, I felt my breath taken away. I just wanted to stand there in silence and watch it. The wind was blowing so hard that day and it swayed gently as it held onto the wood below it. It nodded it's head at me as I watched it. Suddenly, I watched it reach over and grab a spider between it's strong legs and eat it in front of me. It was a wondrous sight to behold.

I've always been interested in the secret meanings of Animal totems and I felt this was a sign from the Universe. It had to be. I've always felt as though spider was a totem for me -- I was raised in a very open minded family, I have part cherokee in me and was influenced by a lot of Native American friends. When I was younger, spiders kept finding me- I would constantly find them everywhere, in and on everything I was working on. Mind you, I'm not exactly fond of spiders. Then these huge blue and red weird spider's started to make webs outside the window of my patio door at my old house. I started dreaming of spiders every night. My friends and family warned me to read up on what spider totem meant because I was just going to keep running into spiders unless I listened to the message they had to teach me. One day I was laying in bed with my sky window open and one lone huge red and blue spider fell straight down from the window on a single line of web and stopped inches from my face.

That day I took out the Animal Speak by Ted Andrews book and read what spider meant. Spider means so much I would highly recommend reading about them. I won't go to much into detail because I feel a lot of the message is personal for me to look at within myself. In general though, spider is about teaching you to maintain a balance in your life -- your past and your future. It's about "weaving your web" to create your future. The web also symbolizes creative energies circling around you (the center point of a web). Spider in myths is known as the guardian of Languages -- another message is about using your creative energies to inspire others.

The Pray mantis teaches you about calming (stilling) the mind and going into your soul, being patient and waiting for the right moment to strike.

The following day after the first Pray mantis, I sat down to have dinner, and sitting on a piece of mail my mother had brought it was a little tiny baby Pray Mantis. How it got there, I have no idea - We carefully took it back outside, but to me it was  another sign to look deep inside myself.                                                                        

Are you "weaving your own web" and creating the kind of life you want for yourself? Change is upon us, I see it everywhere in every aspect of everyone's lives right now. Everything seems to be turning upside down - for better and for worse! Let's focus more on the earlier - take a step back and think about everything going on in your life; contemplate it -- and you'll see no matter what is going on right now, the universe won't throw more at you than you can handle and you will come out of it a much stronger individual!

Being that today is 9/11 I just wanted to add in -  Always Remember! RIP all those who passed on this day, years ago.. Look to the past for reminder and keep your chin up to the future. Even one person can make a change in our world for the better!