Today someone pointed out to me the important relationship between trauma and formality. They explained that they knew people who were so traumatized, fearful, and disconnected that they reverted to a sort of brutal formality: everything was rigid manners, rote routines and roles. They described a human being bereft of Life, subsisting on the paltry scraps of formality.
And yet formality is necessary for life. We are vertebrates. We are combinations of living flesh and stable structure.
The soul is nomic and natural, and that is okay.
Because formality also supplies safety, reliability, predictability. What would I do without the formality of the working week the grocery store?
And how much pain did it cause me for my most recent living situation to collapse, for my routines to be threatened?
How strange, this delicate dance with shape and form that we undertake. We needs the forms. The forms are real and good and often natural.
What is a human trellis?
