“A mind is a bit like a peculiarly formed spider-web. Many circular webs have an astonishing feature at their center… there is a strange structure that bears a likeness to the spider itself, or, perhaps, it’s spirit or mind. This structure is often somewhat arbitrary, but looks a bit like the shadow of a spider might look, if parts of it were distorted.

Our minds in youth capture a vast range of different forms of stimuli and the results of observation and interaction; but as we age, this process transforms. Over time, many of us become accustomed to capture things that disturb or even feed upon us — there is something compelling about ‘taking offense’ or things that frighten or anger us, and often our webs become badly distorted in a way that disorients both their structure and our relationships with them.

What is not ordinarily clear to our awareness in consciousness and thought is that, unlike spiders, we are not usually deconstructing and restructuring our webs at night. This is, perhaps, one aspect of the results of dreaming, which gives us an opportunity to exist and relate in ways that are astonishingly different than those familiar to our waking thought and habit. Many of the strands we use and are used by during our waking lives are ancient, dusty, old, and contain the detritus of many previous captures. Any disturbance of such a strand does not give a clean signal; rather, all the weight of previous captures is transmitted to our senses as though it is happening in this moment — and this can lead us to fear, pain, confusion, and vast misevaluation of our situations and relationships in the moment.

Most of the webbing we use when awake, is the result not of creativity or true relation, but habit — and, particularly, those habits which are the long-term results of situations and behaviors in which we may have felt trapped or compelled… by fear, shame, guild, desire, punishment or reward. Noticing this, we can encourage each other to begin to learn to take the old webbing down, and restructure our mental webs with an orientation toward discovery, learning, play, rewarding growth, compassion, love… and true relation.

Then, perhaps, we will get signals that are actually useful… and our webs will ‘not be sticky’ to that which is not nourishing. In fact, as we learn to practice weaving the web of the waking mind and relation, we are entering an authorial process, rather than that of a spectator, and this is more like our true nature, origins, and potentials as animal and human beings.”

— a lexicographer