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I am Julie Metz. Welcome!
Consider the Spider began as a short video I posted on Instagram while on vacation in Maine.
This Substack began as a short Instagram reel I posted while on vacation in Maine. One morning I spotted a spider building its web in the frame of a window in our rental house. I’ve seen many spider webs, but I had never witnessed this creative process up close. We watched the spider labor, truly awestruck, as it pulled out silk from its body, measured a length, and attached each strand to the next rung of rays already in place. So time-consuming, so physically exhausting, so extraordinary.
I thought about my favorite weaver: Charlotte, the heroine of E. B. White’s classic tale. Somewhere in my house, I still had the rain-warped paperback copy of Charlotte’s Web my parents had read to us kids during a Maine vacation decades earlier. Where did this endless supply of silk come from? How do spiders understand how to do this meticulous work?
I asked my partner Clark to hold up a piece of black cardboard behind the web to block the sun’s glare and after the scene came into focus, I recorded a short video on my phone. This brief reel has delighted many thousands of viewers. When I conceived the idea for this Substack I decided that the spider at work was a perfect example of what I hoped to create for readers: concise dives into my areas of interest: writing life, creativity, the natural world, family, the ongoing project of being a feeling human in these times.
I hope you will enjoy my weekly offerings here. I’d love to hear from you!
