Held Taut

Every Day Something Is Dropped

May 30, 2026

One of the features of minds is that they build by layering. New cultural patterns are embroidered on top and out of the old ones. Minds repurpose what is already there, layering habit over habit, concept over concept, identity over identity.

I see it as a spider web — each strand held taut by the others, the whole structure defined as much by the gaps as by the threads. Each dimension of awareness spans the space of experience with its tension: loud and quiet, outside and inside, self and other, now and then, bright and dark, tasty and bland, solid and void, beautiful and ugly, joyful and painful, meaningful and pointless. Phenomena are like specks of dust carried by the wind, and the mind experiences the world as the vibration of strands.

Make the web too dense and it would not catch anything. The space between strands is what matters. A good web is elegant, light and beautiful, flexible, yet strong. It is not burdened with fixed ideologies, rigid identities or dogmas. It caresses, compassionately hugs the phenomena, making space for them to come and go.

“In the pursuit of learning,

every day something is acquired.

In the pursuit of Tao,

every day something is dropped”

- Laozi

I often get asked what I gain from my meditation practice. The question comes with a built-in assumption that it would be an addition to the cultural web, another layer of threads. Accepting this vocabulary is a mistake, because what the practice does is not so much adding to the web, but making space in it.

Meditation allows me to see the layers of the cultural web and pick out those that are useful, and drop those that are not. To release the unnecessary tension, to let more air through. The mind is no longer the web, but the spider that weaves it.

There is a particular vertigo when a strand you thought was structural turns out to be ornamental. A taut strand begets the objects that we attach to and fear losing. This fear is both an obstacle and a pointer — to find more space, follow your fears.

When the tension between inside and outside dissolved, the calm remove I’d mistaken for equanimity turned out to be just distance. Without it, attention was not a neutral spotlight but something that touched and was touched by everything.

Epistemic certainties dissolved — not into nihilism but into pragmatism: choosing a vocabulary because it works, not because it’s True. I can pick the appropriate way of seeing and talking without having to commit to it beyond the context it is adequate in. I can be religious when I practice with my sangha and I can be secular and scientific when I step into my workplace. The contradiction between these views is not gone, but is simply unproblematic.

Sacred and profane — another strand. In Russian culture, there’s a cherished trope: we may be poor, but we are духовные—spiritually deep. This only makes sense if you keep the material and the spiritual in separate rooms. Spend a morning in Bali watching offerings placed on every threshold and the trope becomes visible for what it is: not an insight but a cope, built on a duality that is itself optional.

Each release leaves the web vibrating. The remaining strands take up unfamiliar tensions. I mourn each previous configuration — not because it was good, but because it was known. The unconventional wisdom is that all strands are ornamental and it is only the weaving itself that is structural.