Shibari for Disoriented Spiders

A tangled meditation on land, loss, and erotic knot-tying

A meme went around a few years ago that said:
“What’s the word for when you are very smart but can’t remember anything and know literally nothing?”

I have been feeling that. Hard.

Lately, I find myself blinking at the world like I’ve just woken up in the middle of someone else’s dream. What is humanity again? What are the rules? How have I broken them? And is anything actually okay?

Genocide. The Treaty Principles Bill. The fascists. Destiny Church. And overhead, a strange long caterpillar of lights slides across the night sky like nothing’s out of the ordinary.

I feel disassembled. And the only thing that seems to make sense is lying belly-down on the ground — like a baby on its mother’s chest — waiting for my breath to slow. That helps.

Sometimes, the ground is mossy and damp and smells like stories. Sometimes, it’s dry and scratchy, and crickets leap wildly through the grass. Sometimes, I forget the ground exists at all and spend hours pacing the mental hallways of concrete high-rises.

When a spider’s web is broken, the spider behaves as if it’s had a stroke.¹ It pauses. Disoriented. Momentarily unable to move. I feel a kinship with that spider.

I open my eyes and blink. What happened? Who am I? What was I doing before the world fell apart?

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The mind isn’t just in the brain — it’s in the body, in the land, in the relational weave we belong to. When that weave is torn, we lose more than perspective. We lose the thread that holds us together.

I experience this as a kind of vertigo. A dizzying drop in meaning. A sudden inability to locate the story of who I am or how I’m supposed to be in the world.

Eventually, through the body, silk arrives. I find these limbs know how to weave.

But hold on. Before the web gets rebuilt — before the story gets stitched back together — I want to pause.

Because there’s something tender, something essential, in that in-between space. The stunned moment after rupture, before repair.

For a spider, that pause might last seconds. For humans, it can stretch across years. Across generations.

How do I begin to remember who I am and what I’m doing here?
How do I begin to remember what I forgot long before this body was born?

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Here in Aotearoa, Māori culture offers the gift of whakapapa — a way of tracing connection through generations, through place, through story. A way of remembering ourselves as part of a larger whole.

As a seventh-generation Pākehā with Scottish, English, and Dutch ancestry, I’ve been tracing those threads. Many of my ancestors arrived here in the 1840s and 1850s, pushed out of Europe by war, poverty, and enclosure.

They left behind their homelands, the bones of their ancestors, their griefs — and arrived here carrying hopes and hungers they may not have had words for.

I carry their longings in my belly. Their silences in my chest.

We, the “children of cannon fodder and global capitalism,”² rarely name what was lost in that leaving. And so, we rarely recognise the grief that shapes us. The grief of disconnection. The ache for belonging.

My belly-to-ground breathing begins to make more sense in this light — as a kind of ancestral homesickness. My guts know something my mind forgets: that we were meant to be in relationship with place.

But growing up without that relationship — without whenua — leaves us desensitised. When you are born into disconnection, it’s easy to assume it’s normal. Easy to mistake numbness for peace.

This numbness, this weird forgetfulness,³ is part of the settler condition. It allows us to overlook the ongoing violence of colonisation. It helps us justify our control of land and resources. It shields us from the intimacy of the losses we’ve caused — and the losses we’ve inherited.

But the forgetting didn’t just happen. It was taught. Inherited. And sometimes, chosen — as a survival strategy, a comfort, a means of staying afloat in a system that rewards amnesia.

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Moana Jackson wrote of our ancestors:

“It was hard to feel at home when the descendants of those who had been killed were never far away and the smoke of the battlefields still lingered in the smoke of the forests that were being burned.”

In island stories, he said, “the intimacy of distance never lets memory entirely fade away.”⁴

And yet — fade it does. Or at least, it gets ignored.

As I explore my whakapapa, I begin to see how numbness, silence, and disorientation aren’t personal failings. They’re part of what I’ve inherited. Part of what has kept me from feeling the full weight — and fullness — of being here.

I know that naming these things matters. It can begin to orient me. But cognitive understanding alone isn’t enough.

As an artist, a dancer, a poet, I know that cognitive meaning-making alone won’t transform me. That happens in the body. In the relationships I tend. In the silences I’m willing to sit with.

So I stay with the disorientation. I resist the urge to patch the web. I practice not-knowing — not as avoidance, but as devotion.

Because it’s in that space — the open tear — that something begins to shift.

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I believe there is more sense to be made of all this, but I’m not in a hurry to get there. That urge to resolve, to make meaning too soon, belongs to the same logic that tore the web in the first place.

Instead, I’m trying to linger at the edge, to dwell in the strange a little longer.

“Look for the trickster,” says Bayo Akomolafe. “Run to the safety of trouble.”⁵

This disorientation — this unmooring, this dizziness — might not be a problem to be solved, but a portal. A threshold where new possibilities sneak in on strange legs.

The world is not ending, he says. It’s shedding skins. Becoming otherwise. I don’t want to miss the sacred mischief of this moment by reaching for old certainties.

The web is not just something we repair. It is also something that remakes us. The rupture itself might be a teacher. A trickster. A guide.

So I’m trying to stay here — with the hole in the story. I’m trying to listen. To trust the discomfort.

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Reciprocity with the natural world isn’t something I decide to practice — not like a resolution or a task on a list. It’s something that finds me when I stop trying to be in control. When I let the earth press its cool palm against my belly.

The web is older than me, and wiser. It stretches across galaxies and generations, across bloodlines and biomes. It does not need me to understand it.

But it welcomes me when I show up with my small silken thread, spun from grief and wonder and not-knowing.

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Where I really want to go is somewhere quieter. And weirder. Somewhere that can’t be diagrammed or peer-reviewed or turned into a five-point plan.

I want to slide diagonally out of the frame.

Dear god, get me out of this sentence structure.
Drag me backwards to a strange ritual in the undergrowth.
I want to be haunted by something timeless —
mischievous and disorienting, just out of sight.

I don’t want to fix the web.
I just want to feel it.
Let it touch me first.
Let it give me a little fright.

Maybe there’s no web to reconstruct, because the web never left.
Maybe it’s been brushing up against my skin this whole time — I just forgot how to notice.
Maybe there’s a part of me that still knows how to meet it —
the part that leans into tension just enough to see if it holds.

---

While this weird forgetfulness may be part of my inheritance, so too is the capacity to remember. Remembering my family’s history in this land. Remembering my own deep longing for connection with place. Remembering the quiet wisdom of the body, which knows how to press itself to the earth and wait.

I could keep following the genealogical thread further back — to the Highland Clearances, to the witch trials, to the agricultural and cognitive revolutions, all the way to when homo sapiens first left Africa 70,000 years ago, and beyond.

But today?

Today I’m heading to a class called Shibari for Absolute Beginners — to learn the Japanese art of erotic knot-tying.

It feels oddly appropriate. A way of remembering, through the body, how connection works. A way of feeling out the shape of a web — one knot at a time.

I’ll be sure to let you know if it grants me secret access to the unified field of oneness — that unbroken, unbreakable thread.

With love,
Rata

P.S. Don’t scroll down if you’re scared of spiders.

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I found this friend on my bath towel this morning.

1. Supracellular by Sophie Strand

2. Catherine Delahunty in Flush and Forget - Pākehā and Te Tiriti

3. As above

4. Moana Jackson in Imagining Decolonisation

5. The Rise of Tricksters by Bayo Akomolafe