Her sense was that it was for knitting together the web of your life, especially if events had been shattering--a useful remedy for soul retrieval work, she thought. I prevailed upon her to send me some for my burgeoning essence collection, little imagining that it would be needed--and badly--in the not-too-distant future after a shattering experience of my own.

I should preface this tale by saying that I have an enduring affection for spiders, not in a "ooooh, aren't they cute," sense but in a reverent and respectful sense. I would never knowingly harm a spider, and I have a feeling of conscious contact with them whenever they show themselves to me. Their webs grow undisturbed from the day I move into a place until the day I move out.

This reverence could be due to some dim ancestral memory of the Spider Woman--I do have a respectable bit of Native American blood, though I grew up with no tribal connections. At any rate, my longtime connection with spiders may be part of the reason Cobweb essence affected me so profoundly in such a short time.

Much as I enjoy testing remedies, I felt I couldn't take this one at the time it arrived because I was in major homeopathic treatment, preparing for hip replacement surgery. The several weeks before the surgery and the two months after passed in a haze of pain and serious physical limitation in which my life was completely disrupted. Independent soul that I am, I was forced to be dependent on others for even the most basic of needs, and I was unable to work for two months.

When I was finally on my own again, I felt that my life was shattered and scattered to the four winds. I took the potent homeopathic remedies typically recommended after surgery, and they helped in certain respects, especially the physical recovery. However, the feeling that my world had been shattered didn't go away. I kept saying, "I want my life back."

When I said that to Gretchen, she said it sounded like I could use a course of her Cobweb essence, to knit the strands of my life back together. I added it to my already existing dosage bottle of aura repair remedies (Yarrow, Pennyroyal, and Fringed Violet) the moment we got off the phone. I started taking it every two hours, like Rescue Remedy.

Within a day and a half, I felt very different. My life, my home, and my office felt like they belonged to me again. The important projects and strands of my work that had been on hold for more than two months started to feel real again instead of like something that might have happened to someone else some time in the distant past.

Friends were amazed at how quickly I improved after that. I cleared all the sickroom equipment away and felt comfortable working with clients instead of being so vulnerable and tentative. I stopped saying, "I want my life back."

Oddly enough, the remedy worked on many levels and repaired strands that had been broken for years. Days after I started taking it, I "coincidentally" got an email from a long-lost friend who tracked me down on the web (the cobweb?). We'd been a solid support system for one another at a time when we were both writing fiction and poetry. We became estranged over some foolishness, and we both subsequently moved and lost touch. After that, I was heartbroken when some mysteries I wrote were rejected a dozen times, and I lost all interest in writing about five years ago.

Now that she'd found me, we exchanged just a few emails, as long-lost friends will do, and the web went silent again, but it didn't matter. I found that writing her about the devastating rejections began to thaw out the writer in me.

I started writing again, maybe not a book, but enough to reclaim my identity as a writer. I was less heartbroken, more willing to write for the sheer pleasure of it rather than worrying whether any given piece would be published. You may call it a coincidence that my five-year writing block began to melt within days of taking Cobweb, but you couldn't convince me--or the spiders who live with me--of that!

Some months later, the question of a second surgery to replace the other hip arose, but I couldn't address it at all. Too much fear and trauma remained from that first devastating surgery. I determined to undertake an intensive healing project to get free of the disabling emotional residues. Once I decided that, typically, I went at it full tilt for six weeks. It was harrowing -- a nightmare -- that brought to the surface every trauma in my less-than-idyllic childhood.

At the end, though the terror was gone, I felt exhausted, depressed, and inert. I was unable to take up the strands of my life again and unwilling to do much more than stay in bed and read all day long. I felt I would never be the same, that my usual courage and independent spirit had permanently deserted me.

For several days, I felt a prompting to try Cobweb essence again. I resisted since I'd taken another potent homeopathic remedy several weeks earlier and since I was, frankly, skeptical that a mere essence could make a dent in the inertia and depression. At last I decided it couldn't hurt, so I began taking it as a single remedy every two hours, day and night.

By the next morning, I was able, gingerly, to mobilize myself to work again. Within another eight hours, I was able to contemplate a future again, one where I might conceivably be a useful citizen of the world. Cobweb essence, much to my astonishment, had cleared away a morass that had every sign of persevering indefinitely.

If you'd like to try Cobweb essence, you could get in touch with Gretchen Lawlor. See also Daniel Maple's article on Wild Earth Animal Essences in this issue, as their Spider Essence is similar.

DISCLAIMER: Results may not be typical. Individual spiders may vary and tend not to be well disposed toward people who cavalierly dispose of their webs. Do ask Spider Woman's permission if you decide to make the remedy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ivory Phoenix is the nom de plume of someone who for the past twenty years has been a devout user of vibrational healing tools like flower remedies, homeopathy, Reiki, and light work, and who, despite all that, has yet to reach perfection. Go figure.

ART CREDITS: Based on graphics from a clip art disk by Micrografx.