06/09/2026
The overwhelming response to my post about our infant rat rescue has been incredibly eye opening and deeply comforting. So many people shared how much they were moved by that tiny life, and hearing from all of you left me feeling hopeful. It reminded me that when we encourage one another to see the world through a more compassionate lens, those small shifts matter. Maybe we’ll never build a perfect utopia, but I do believe we can help create a world with a softer side, one where more people pause, notice, and choose kindness when they can.
It also reminded me that maybe there are more people looking for reasons to care than there are looking for reasons not to. And because of that, I felt comfortable sharing this story too.
This winter, I found a tiny jumping spider near my bed. Like most of us who coexist with spiders, I probably wouldn’t have thought much of her beyond admiring her fuzzy little pedipalps.
Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time learning about the animals who share this property with us, not limited to the domesticated and the obvious wild birds and mammals but also just below that surface, like the jumping spiders who seem to be everywhere at the sanctuary. Through that, I learned that a spider’s abdomen can tell you a lot about how they’re doing. A healthy jumping spider carries a plump abdomen. A dehydrated or starving spider often doesn’t. I was reminded that sometimes these too are animals who need help.
This little one was so thin that I knew immediately she was struggling. So I offered her a drop of water on a cotton swab, the safe way to water a spider who can drown just from getting damp. Immediately and enthusiastically she drank.
Answering this basic need not because she was someone’s pet, or because she was endangered or because she was beautiful in the ways we usually define beauty, but because she was thirsty.
Once she had her fill, she wandered off on her way. I don’t know what happened to her after that. One drink of water wasn’t going to solve every problem in her life. But for that moment, she wasn’t as thirsty as she had been before.
Lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about compassion, and its ultimate trajectory. In a world that often seems to be losing compassion even for our fellow humans, it can feel strange to talk about kindness toward a spider.
But I don’t think compassion works from the top down. I don’t think we learn compassion by starting with the beings that everyone already agrees are worthy of it. I think we learn it from the bottom up.
We learn it by looking at a creature most people fear, ignore, or kill without a second thought and asking ourselves a simple question:
“What does this individual need right now?”
Sometimes the answer is nothing. Sometimes the answer is simply leaving them alone. Sometimes it’s choosing not to put a house spider outside in the middle of winter, knowing that many species have spent countless generations adapting to life indoors and won’t survive the cold.
And sometimes it’s noticing that a tiny spider is thirsty, and offering a drop of water.
One of the lessons this work continues to teach me is that compassion is no longer just about avoiding harm, but it also doesn’t hinge on solving every problem. It’s about making the world a little easier to navigate for the lives we encounter along the way. It’s about paying attention. It’s about caring enough to learn who our neighbors are, how they live, what they need, and when they might need our help. Because every meaningful act of compassion starts the same way:
First, we notice.
Then we care.
Then we learn.
Then we act.
Even when the life in front of us is very small.
