The Web... a story about feeling upset and finding space
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So, he closed his eyes and tried it. He’d done it twice then his eyes opened and as he looked up, he noticed a big spiders web between the trees. It was wet and was glistening in fact the tiny drops of water on it looked like precious jewels. He’d have loved to gather the jewels and take them for his treasure box. But he knew that if he touched the web it would break. So, he just looked and looked and looked at it. He began to trace the lines with his finger, without touching. It was amazing. Not all the shapes were the same size, some were smaller, some longer, some thinner but all together made this beautiful web. He wondered where the spider was that had made it. He looked at the places where the web was attached to the trees and noticed by one of them a spider…just sitting there, waiting.
He was only small. Everybody said so, and they never listened to him. Sometimes he felt as if he wasn’t there. Nobody took any notice of him except when he’d done something to make them angry ….by getting in the way or not sharing things. When he woke up that morning, he was still feeling very upset. He’d gone to bed feeling like that. He was in trouble and his tummy felt as if someone had tied a knot in it, and his head felt like it did when he’d banged into a wall or the ground when he fell off his bike. He could hear the rain on the window. He liked listening to the rain ….and then it stopped. Then he heard the shouting begin again. He jumped out of bed, pulled on his joggers, put on a hoody. He opened the bedroom door quietly and ran downstairs, out of the backdoor and into the garden. Before anyone could shout anything at him. He ran across the grass which felt wet under his bare feet and to the big trees by the fence at the end of the garden. He scrambled between two of them and sat down on the ground behind them. He loved to hide here when things got a bit too much. There was a good smell… he was not sure what it was, but it was a bit like when his mum sprayed air freshener around, but better than that! He was a bit out of breath. He remembered that someone had told him to try and think about his breath when he was upset, to breathe in through his nose….1,2,3,4,5, and then out again through his mouth 5,4,3,2,1.
It wasn’t very big. He wondered how such a small spider had managed to spin a web between the trees. How could something so small create something so big and beautiful as this web. He looked at the spider and his long legs, he wriggled his own. As he sat there just ‘looking’ he began to feel warm all over…it began in his tummy … and it spread out through his body, his arms and legs. Then he realised the knot in his tummy didn’t feel quite so bad. He smiled. And his head didn’t hurt anymore … He heard his mum calling him… and he realised that he could see the door of his house through the web and his mum standing there. Somehow it looked and felt..... ok… He said goodbye to the spider, crawled between the trees and ran back across the grass……..