Wherever you are there's always a spider within six feet of you
I’ve now long forgotten where I first heard this saying, but it never failed to take up residence in my mind, and to be honest, I still think about this statistic quite a bit. It’s one of the many things that even though I know it’s not necessarily true, I doubt it will ever leave my mind.
What if you’re skydiving? That seems entirely impossible. Swimming? Snowstorm? I used to spend hours thinking about this question and how it could be possible for these bugs to be so common to be almost everywhere. I think about these sometimes when I have the window open at night and can hear the crickets chirping outside thinking about how close I am to a black widow or a brown recluse or even just a more common house spider.
Hello, My name is Hannah Bruce and I am a first-year DLab student at One Stone and I was also part of the first wave of X-Lab here, and at least in my opinion, I have grown quite a bit since joining the community here. Most of the information on my T-Popper has been subject to me being given the time and experiences to find what I’m passionate about and to find things that I want to pursue through the open learning style. I have found myself growing in different parts of environmental science, writing skills, and becoming a more empathetic person. These passions are specifically what brought me to want to share this artifact as my submission. My artifact is an art piece and an excerpt from a personal essay that I wrote during my Human Nature immersion and is what I based the drawing upon. This project (however weirdly insignificant it may seem being about an interaction with a spider and all) worked to help me deepen my understanding of the creatures, both with a bit of light research on the topic and in reflective writing. The art piece is an attempted extension of that, it’s a visual of a thought that I used to have constantly and that was the myth that there was always a spider within six feet of you. It’s a drawing of two people skydiving with an excerpt explaining my past with the topic. As for doing good with this project, I wanted the essay to make people pause and think back to experiences they have had with animals that they didn’t know much about, and therefore, didn’t feel bad about killing. I wanted to promote more empathy among animals that normally don’t get “fawned” over as much and therefore don’t get as much respect or warmth from us because they aren’t something that we have deemed worthy of it.
