The Thread of the Flying Spider

Records of the Thread — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 14:28:13 GMT

A disturbance happens. So the spider repairs the tension in their web. And if their web is destroyed, they build a new one. Maybe somewhere else. And there, in that place, all of the spiders give you free lectures on: creation, displacement, rebuilding, feeling the unseen, vibration, and the concept of Home.

What the facio.

This is my first Substack post.

Facio is latin for: to make, to build, to do. My neurodivergent, soon-to-be 13-year-old son taught me this. Facio feels important here—because when we’re sitting inside the rubble of our ideas that we haven’t brought to life—yet—it makes sense to think of building. Making. Creating.

You know when you have a great idea but you don’t follow through on it? Then you see someone else do it well? You might become Austin Powers maneuvering a 37-point turn in a narrow hallway.

Or.

You know when you’re doing the thing you hope to birth into the world, but still feel buried in the slush pile—and the lack of visibility aches like a night without your retainer?

Or.

You’re facio tired and overwhelmed by everything in the whole facio world so you. just. can’t. produce. like. everyone. else. and the operator in charge of your dreams puts you on hold…and when she gets back on the line, she asks: Does it seem like everyone else is crushing it? Mmmmm.

Does it feel like your chance has already passed? I see.

Or like you can’t keep up? Lord—yes.

The window of opportunity to cross the railroad tracks is gone.

The red lights flash.

The barrier gates go down.

Too bad. You’re stuck.

And you’re stopped by the comparison train carrying 90+ boxcars, each one cordially inviting you to wonder what kind of freight it’s hauling.

Don’t go on your phone.

Always carry a pen and notebook with you.

Find the magic button that’s hidden inside every form of transportation that Big Brother doesn’t want you to know about but is your God-given rite.

The button is a spider.

It will teleport you to a small space wedged between the window of your heart and the 95th floor of the John Hancock building in Chicago. There, you will meet a flying spider, who will tell you that you don’t need to shame yourself for not completing one of your dreams on someone else’s timeline. That you can share the same dream as others but know that your version is uniquely yours.

The spider will ask you: what will you do with your personal thread?

They will whisper: You’re the only one in charge of weaving your own web.

Today, my fellow spiritual detective friend, Marisa Love, and I talked about jealousy, identity, authenticity and the impossibly high expectations of productivity in a non-stop virtual-working world. Marisa is a professional intuitive, a writer, and a fellow seeker of wonder and magic. She meditates often and when she told me about seeing spiders hanging from threads in a tree during a dragon meditation, I recognized a synchronicity and discovered a forgotten memory. It was a small synchronicity—but equally important nonetheless.

The smallest of things matter.

Just the day before, I had been sitting beneath the shade of a tree on a gloriously sunny & breezy day. And the tree had tiny spiders hanging from threads. I’ll never know if they were dropping ladders from tiny helicopters, sending messages, or fishing for gnats, but what I witnessed, Marisa described in her meditation.

So, I took note.

It was Memorial Day. A holiday devoted to remembering.

I had just parked and gotten out of my car. There were numerous Detroit families grilling, the air thick with barbecue. I scanned the overgrown field with swaying grass and saw Shelly in the distance, near the river, waving her arms.

I lifted my checked skirt as I walked through the field toward her and crossed paths with a man trying to launch a kite into the air with two children by his side. Just as I approached, the kite caught the wind.

A little boy ran toward me first. He shouted, “Hi!” and pointed to the kite. Then the little girl ran to me next, all teeth, giggling. “Look!” she shouted. “The kite is flying!”

“Hi!” I said, feeling her contagious joy. “Look at that kite fly!”

“It’s Spider man. Spidey is flying! Spidey is flying!” she exclaimed.

“Wow!” I said, “Thank you for sharing with me!”

I laughed and waved goodbye.

At that moment, I didn’t know that I would spend the afternoon sitting beneath a tree filled with spiders hanging from threads. Or that 8 years earlier doctors would describe my survival as hanging on by a thread. Or that 10 years before that, I watched a spider fly from a thread outside the John Hancock building.

But sometimes the story arrives before we understand it.

I had gone to meet some old friends near the Detroit river on Belle Isle. They offered me a camping chair nestled in the shade of that spider tree, and while talking about the Ai invasion and big corporations buying up healthy food brands, these spiders dropped down around me. I felt like a spider queen. Except it was Shelly, my old roommate from Chicago, who pointed them out to her daughter Ruthie (who didn’t show much interest)—but I did. Sometimes we need others to point out the magical.

Maybe they were spider fae dropping Jacob’s ladder.

Maybe they were trying to save us.

What I do know is that the tree spiders were connecting us: Marisa and me. Shelly and me. Two different days in two different ways. Two friends who didn’t know each other but knew me.

A strange mystery.

These noticings are why I’m here. It’s what I’ve signed up for. It’s why I write. I want to acknowledge connection where it isn’t normally found. After surviving a cranial hematoma, an abusive relationship, and two arterial dissections, I began to notice threads everywhere. I began to see them as signs for reconnection and healing.

Those threads became my lifeline.

My experiences changed what I paid attention to.

Life remains beautiful. Even amidst terror.

I am actively choosing, day-by-day, to dig in and excavate.

Those spiders hanging from the tree were tiny and when you looked at them from one perspective they seemed to defeat the laws of everything you thought you knew because they floated—mid-air—alongside bubbles Shelly blew through a deep pink wand. From another perspective, the sun reflected iridescent shimmers on their thin, powerful silk. They sparkled.

The spiders had something to hold on to.

That powerful string lived within them.

It was their lifeline.

In Elaine Pagel’s Gnostic Gospels she translated a Nag Hammadi text of the coptic Gospel of Thomas that quoted Jesus saying, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Reading that quote now, I think of spider silk. What if all living things are teachers and messengers for each other? What if humans and spiders aren’t all that different?

Spiders bring forth what is within them to: survive, move through the world, protect themselves, and to create.

Maybe we do too.

What if our painting, writing, cooking, bread-baking, teaching, nursing, barista-ing, rock & stick collecting, walking, teaching, learning, shooting hoops, our musical things, our friendships, laughter—and our dreams—what if they are all spider silk?

Maybe these threads are the diner alien in the Spaceballs movie trying to claw their way out from our insides because they need to be seen.

Things refusing to stay hidden.

No joke—at the same moment I wrote the above line, my younger brother texted me a photo of a swampy scene and wrote “Can you spot the 2 foot gator head hiding in this photo?”

Synchronicity.

Connection.

Hidden in plain sight.

Jesus’ teachings are not all that mysterious. Maybe they’re the same as the spiders’. Maybe it’s about being open to possibility. Following the threads and activating them with wonder. Using them to create.

“I had a dream and because I did not live my dream, my dream was making me sick.” (Black Elk from “Black Elk Speaks” by John Neihardt.)

This happened to me.

For a long time, I thought my dream was to become a published author and artist.

But after surviving two vertebral artery dissections, I’ve come to realize that dreams don’t have to be professions.

The dissections taught me about disconnection and reconnection—losing touch with family, friends, with creativity, and with myself.

And they taught me something else—

My dream is actually to love my life.

Surviving and living are not the same thing.

Writing is one thread that helps me do that.

What Marisa and I were really talking about was: What are the threads that keep you connected? What threads keep you alive and well? The spiders rappelling down their silk in the tree reconnected me with a forgotten memory.

The memory surfaced like the Vasa warship—raised from the depths of the Stockholm harbor. Not lost. Found and preserved.

Twenty years ago while living in Chicago, I decided, on a whim, to take myself out on a date. I just didn’t know it would be with a flying spider. I took one of the many elevators in the John Hancock Center to the Signature Lounge on the 95th floor. Have you seen that skyscraper? It’s a black marvel with criss-crossing, X-braced steel beams that form diamonds. When it was built in 1969, it was the second tallest building in the world. It looms. It’s iconic. And it’s in the Magnificent Mile one block away from the best beach in the city with expansive turquoise views of the great Lake Michigan.

Once inside of the Signature Lounge, I was seated next to a window. Only a large pane of glass separated me from the clouds and the view. I could see everything at once— the suburbs where I had lived with my parents and went to high school and all of the city neighborhoods I had called Home: Lincoln Park, Lakeview, Bucktown, Wicker Park, Humbolt Park, Ukrainian Village.

I was sitting at the edge of something.

And on that edge was a spider.

I had never known a flying spider until that moment. I had forgotten that they existed until the conversation with Marisa 20 years later.

It was special to take myself to a fancy lounge and have a cocktail. At that time in my life, I had 5 jobs and still needed my parents to help me with my phone bill. But I’m so glad I did it. Because it wasn’t the luxury of the space, or the almost imperceptible sway my body felt from being so high. It was being given the window seat. yes. The gift of a coveted spot because not all tables lined the perimeter.

The view was overwhelming. It became a Where’s Waldo or Carmen Sandiego scene. Where in the life of Chess has she been? The el stations and bus stops and favorite walking paths. The Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool. My commutes to the schools I went to, and to the jobs I frequented. The intersection where my chain fell off amidst moving traffic when I hoisted my bike onto my shoulder, brought it to the curb, reconnected the chain and arrived to class covered in grease.

A map of my life laid before me.

The horizon at golden hour—bright, warm light along an endless line.

The places least disturbed give us the horizon to marvel at—large bodies of water, expansive land, or views from an airplane—yet there I was inside of a skyscraper. A disturbance built of steel and glass erected a thousand feet into the clouds.

I could marvel there too.

After zooming out to the still line of silhouettes along the horizon—there—a black blob billowing outward in the foreground.

I zoomed in.

A spider held on to their own thread, seemingly floating mid-air.

They were a kite, ballooning outward to trapeze over cloud-piercing windows. They blew back and forth through a potential 48 mile an hour wind.

I looked closer.

There—another spider—walked the 95th floor windowsill like it was nothing. They paused to knit a parachute and after a couple of minutes, lifted their front legs to feel the wind—waited for the conditions to feel right—and leapt into the great abyss.

The spider flew!

The little girl and the spider kite at Belle Isle now shared a thread.

And years later, another thread would save my life. After my first vertebral artery dissection, doctors and nurses told me that I was lucky to be alive. That the clot near my brain looked like a balloon hanging on by a thread.

A balloon hanging on by a thread.

It was that thread that saved me.

It was the spider’s thread that saved them.

Maybe…that’s why, all these years later, the skyscraper spider memory has stayed with me.

The smallest life I could visibly acknowledge became the most interesting…because how?

How could this tiny marvel exist in these conditions?

How could they survive?

How could such a thin, nearly invisible thread be so strong?

How could I have forgotten this experience?

At the end of our conversation, I told Marisa that I had created a Substack account months earlier and finally felt ready to write my first post. When I signed in, I laughed. I had forgotten both the title and the profile picture I had chosen. The title: Records of the Thread. The photo: me wearing the beaded spider bolero tie that my mom gave me for Christmas.

Were these synchronicities orchestrated?

The next day, Marisa told me that after our discussion she couldn’t get the flying spider out of her head. It had jogged a memory of her own. She found a post from three years ago on her Instagram page—of a poem she had written and recited called “The Flying Spider of the Sun.”

While writing this essay, I looked up “flying spiders” not expecting much.

The spiders I saw on the John Hancock had a name: Bridge Spiders. They’re ordinary Orb Weavers who found a way to thrive in conditions that seem impossible. They’ve adapted—and discovered Home where few would think to look.

The spiders were miracles because of the disruption.

They used their thread to fly.

They scaled glass and steel to impossible heights.

They became steeplejacks, ironworkers, urban climbers and window-washers.

They made a home there.

Spiders are everywhere.

But most of the time we don’t notice—we either ignore them or fear them.

But 95 stories high—they are impossible to ignore. They are impossible to fear.

What is usually hidden in plain sight became visible.

The spider was the most interesting thing in the room.

That memory sent me down a spider hole. I looked up The Signature Lounge—and it no longer exists. At least the name doesn’t. After the Covid-19 pandemic, it closed its doors and remained vacant for years. But like the spider web, the story didn’t end with the disruption. It began there.

A French company that owns 360 CHICAGO, the observatory deck on the 94th floor bought the 95th and 96th floors to reinvent the space. The former Signature Lounge is being transformed into a 3 story atrium that will be one of only a few multi-level observational decks in the world. A place designed for illumination, and noticing.

I found an article with photos of the former Signature Lounge completely deconstructed down to cinder blocks, steel beams, and concrete.

The posh interior had been stripped to its bones.

The spider would understand.

A disturbance happened and the web was destroyed.

So they started over and decided to rebuild.

Further into the article were more photographs.

I gasped.

No glass. There was nothing to separate them from clouds, views, or spiders.

In those photos, men were replacing the very windows where the spiders lived.

It was double vision.

Construction workers on suspended scaffolding in the clouds wearing neon orange and white vests. Personalized hard hats with stickers. Yellow harnesses—and steel cables attached to their bodies.

The men had become the spiders.

How many times does a spider rebuild their web during their lifetime?

How about for humans?

I have rebuilt my web a thousand times.

And each time, I come away as myself, but changed.

It’s not just what or where you rebuild.

It’s who you become after the disruption.

It changes who you think you are. What you keep and what you leave behind.

After moving into a new home of my own, I started to cover nearly every white inch of my Ikea bookshelves with stickers. As a kid, I had covered a white-framed mirror in my bedroom with stickers too. My shelves and that mirror looked oddly alike.

Maybe I wasn’t reinventing myself so much as remembering a lost part of myself. It felt like I had been on an archaeological dig. I had been looking for dinosaurs and I finally found a skeleton.

Growing up, I had a long Italian name that mostly my grandparents would use. But my parents and friends called me something different. Over the years they shortened that name to Chess. It felt like a love-tap. Chessa and Chess are not all that different. Yet they felt like separate worlds.

I’ve chosen to introduce myself as Chess now—and 9 times out of 10 someone says, “Jess?” and I say, “No. Chess. Like the game.”

Even though it is a slice of my legal name, I have chosen to identify as this pared down version of myself.

I didn’t throw the meal away.

I took the spaghetti and meatballs that my mom made, grabbed my own dish—and served myself.

Sometimes rebuilding your web changes what name you answer to.

Even the John Hancock Center is no longer the same. It is now known just by its address: 875 North Michigan Avenue—or—as the former John Hancock Center.

The building stayed the same. It’s just that now it’s not affiliated with a corporation. Now it’s just itself. The 95th floor is still the 95th floor. It’s just no longer the Signature Lounge.

I find it gleefully humorous that this essay circulates identity and John Hancock’s name is synonymous with leaving your mark on the world.

Just place your John Hancock on the dotted line.

Maybe that’s another thread in this story.

I was driving my son to school yesterday and it wasn’t until I was driving alone after I dropped him off that I noticed a thin, barely visible thread catching the morning sun. A sign that a spider had been there. Might still be there. The sun-tapped silk connected my seatbelt to the inside window near the rearview mirror.

Safety and Reflection.

These invisible threads are there.

I see you.

I exist.

So do you.

They connect us across continents.

One of my favorite tarot deck creators, Three Trees Tarot, is based out of the United Kingdom. They recently released The Winding—a tarot deck that follows a single spider on their journey.

While writing this essay, I learned that my copy made it to the United States—and returned to the UK.

I gave the wrong zip code.

There and Back again.

The spider is still winding their way home.

They haven’t arrived—yet.

If this essay resonated with you, please subscribe below. More stories are waiting to arrive in their own time. Share this post with someone, or leave a comment below. I’d love to hear the threads you’ve noticed in your own life.

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