Early this morning, reaching to turn on the kitchen faucet to draw water for tea, I discovered a little spider scrabbling around in the bottom of the sink. She was trapped by its steep metal sides, with no possibility of escape other than the dicey proposition of the garbage disposal.

Ironically, she must have worked hard to get herself into this unfortunate position: first climbing the three flights of stairs to my little top-floor condo--an Everest for someone her size--and then finding her way indoors and into my kitchen sink. It would have been so much easier to have gone anywhere else!

Now, from her vantage point, circumstances must have seemed truly bleak. Perhaps she was regretting the diligent effort she had expended to get herself into this awful spot. Fortunately, I was more or less equipped to help. I rummaged in the recycle bin until I found a jar and a piece of cardboard. I set the jar over her, slid the cardboard under her, and then put her, jar and all, up on the counter.

She still wasn't home free, quite yet, because I was still in my pajamas, unready to go out in public, even if just for a moment on my balcony. So she had to wait a few minutes until I showered and dressed--in that time, surely, thinking that her world had gone from very bad to even worse. Finally--perhaps at the moment she had truly given herself up for lost--I took her to the edge of the balcony, and shook the jar until she floated out and down into the shrubbery below. How wonderful those familiar bushes must have seemed to her in that moment! Perhaps she vowed never to leave them again.

A little later, bicycling off to work, I thought about how our present situation might feel much like hers. It's easy to feel that though we've worked and worked all our lives, things only seem to have become more challenging. Problems and dangers seem to be crowding us on all sides. The prices of everything we need are rising; so much of the world is caught up in war or calamity; the country's finances are in miserable shape; less and less help is available for the most vulnerable among us; and worst of all is the specter of climate change, looming above all else.

It strikes me, though, that very likely we are no more able than the spider to see or even imagine the big picture. Perhaps we are, metaphorically, still in the sink, or maybe we're in the jar. Though it may seem that we're coming to the end of the line with no hope of escape, it's worth remembering that it must have seemed so to the spider this morning, only moments before she found herself back in the rhododendron patch, safe and sound.