Edition #63: Weaving Webs and Turning Over Stones
Creating the Webbd Wheel: Rules
Rules have always fascinated me. Who makes them. Why we make them. How (or if) they are enforced.
When I was a child, my grandmother taught me to iron. We started with handkerchiefs, which tells you something about my age! We had the board, the iron, the water for sprinkling. We talked about temperature and steam. When I had mastered handkerchiefs, we moved on to shirts.
I like ironing. It appeals to my sense of order and cleanliness. I like the smell of it, the heat of it, the Zen of smoothing out fabric. I like the spray starch, the crisp table linen and pillowcases, my fragile old handmade table scarves with their froth of lace. As I began to feel mastery and make this pleasurable (and useful – never forget useful, because that was always the focus for Gram) activity my own, friction arose.
She maintained there was one – and only one – way to properly iron a shirt, and that was her way. The smallest deviation from her way, even to accommodate padded shoulders, ruffles, tucks, or wide sleeves, was wrong. As a child, this seemed ridiculous to me. I was already familiar with the trope about there being more than one way to skin a cat. If the shirt was wrinkle free, why did it make a difference how it got that way? I began to feel controlled, and it made me mad.
It always does.
I rebelled. That was the end of our peaceful ironing sessions. I did it myself when she wasn’t there to criticize.
To this day, I shake my head over this memory. Gram had ironing rules. Iron ironing rules. I never knew if someone taught them to her (she grew up in the era of flatirons heating on the wood stove) or she made them herself, but in her mind they were sacred rules that could not be broken. In my mind they were ridiculous fetters in an otherwise pleasant and satisfying task.
Some societal rules are formally made by those in authority, but many of the rules we live by day-to-day are invisible. We obey them without question. We fear the social sanctions of breaking them more than any fine or imprisonment.
We teach them to our children.
But social rules are not a substitute for a moral compass and the ability to think for ourselves.
One can certainly make an argument for the need for social rules, both formal and informal. Beyond that point, however, rules can become a shit show, as we’ve seen from the front row at the Political Circus we can’t look away from. For seven long years we’ve been trying to tell the difference (is there a difference?) between the clowns and the demons.
In post #63 of The Hanged Man, Rapunzel, a born rebel, questions Maria’s rules about women’s hair, about sex, about shame. Painfully, Maria comes face to face with her own collusion in repressive, unjust social rules and the length (murder and suicide) to which they drove her as she unquestioningly accepted them.
For me, rules are like money. They are concepts we humans make up and agree to. Except when we don’t agree. Except when we break the rules. As we made them, we can unmake them. As far as I’m concerned, many rules were made to be broken, including the “right way” to iron a shirt. Ironing a shirt, most will agree, is not of much importance. But what about rules governing sexuality, the age of consent, and birth control? Now we’re literally making rules with the power of life and death.
Are rules more important than life or death? Stated another way, is the lust for individual power more important than life or death?
I work to be intentional and conscious of the rules I operate under. At the end of the day, I follow my own integrity and conscience without much concern over breaking or obeying any particular rule. I feel free to think outside the box. I also feel free to question the rules binding or restricting me. In my view, a healthy rule or law is one welcoming scrutiny, challenge, and debate. A healthy rule or law is evenly applied to everyone and consequences for breaking it are clear, simple, and consistent. Healthy rules foster power-with rather than power-over.
Weaving Webs
Complexity is an overarching theme in my fiction. Webs. Interconnection. Disconnection. Weaving. Transforming one thing into another. Hidden things. Many of my characters are weavers or spinners. I know old stories about deliberately including an imperfection in a piece of art as an act of acknowledgement of our human imperfection, a kind of propitiation to the divine order of life, which is not clean and neat and perfect, but messy and chaotic.
Do spiders ever make mistakes as they weave their webs? What, after all, is a mistake? Perhaps a mistake is nothing more than an opportunity to expand our craft in such a way the mistake becomes part of the expansion.
At their best, rules and laws function to bind communities together in a healthy web. At their worst, they tear communities apart.
Webs are made, inhabited, lived upon and within, and then abandoned and unmade by time and weather. In the end, all matter breaks down into building blocks for something new. Nothing is forever. Even stone wears away with enough time. The rules and laws we cling to cannot keep us safe. They do not assure power and control. Rigid, unquestioned, unjust rules steal our resilience and flexibility. They keep us trapped in yesterday’s ignorance and ideology.
They break the web.
Turning Over Stones
Questions:
Do you think of yourself as a rule breaker, a rule follower, or a little of each?
What’s the most ridiculous rule you know? Do you follow it?
What are some unconscious rules you follow and are you willing to challenge them?
What punishment for rule breaking frightens you the most? Fines? Imprisonment? Social sanctions?
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