Reflection from Elizabeth Nawrocki, Notre Dame Mission Volunteer
This article initially appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of our magazine, 'Sowing Goodness.' The full issue is available here.
It’s nearly impossible to avoid running into a few spider webs when walking through the woods behind Big Laurel in early September. One web caught the bill of my hat so perfectly that its weaver dangled just inches from my eyes. After a moment of panic, I quickly realized that most of my attention and energy on this fall walk would be directed toward detecting the almost invisible webs and stepping under and around them as best I could.
Preserving these intricate webs hearkens back to an image that has shaped our work here at Big Laurel and beyond. In 1995, the Catholic Committee of Appalachia published “At Home in the Web of Life,” a pastoral message reflecting on the importance of building and maintaining sustainable communities. A sustainable community, an interconnected and interdependent ecosystem, a “web of life” offers a path forward. It is only through careful ecological and social connections that life can survive and flourish.
But this web of life is just as delicate as those I was dodging in the woods. Too often instead of careful consideration for the preservation of these webs, we forge straight ahead, waving a macheteat anything that arises on the path, plowing through the delicate systems of interdependence that have been established for generations. And the uncertainties and difficulties presented in the pastoral message have only multiplied in the intervening decades.
The work of Big Laurel seeks to mend this delicate and broken web. We weave connections and communities that span time and space. We build relationships that transform individuals and shape the world around us. We consider our place in the natural world and take seriously our role within it. The web of life maintains us if we maintain it.
By the end of September, the webs were completely gone from the path and I could walk again without the hyper attention that was previously necessary. Their season came and went in the cyclical web of life. To what other silks in the web should I turn my attention, now? What structures can I help preserve in service to the web of life? Which have been damaging the web and deserve to be dismantled? What wild and sacred places can be left alone to flourish without the threat of my accidental destruction?
May our existence serve only to strengthen, preserve, and weave the delicate web of life.
Elizabeth Nawrocki serves at Big Laurel Learning Center in Kermit, West Virginia. She has spent time studying theology, working with the L’Arche community, community organizing, making lattes, and traveling the country. She was drawn to NDMVA at Big Laurel because of her passion for education, the environment and creativity.