A Culture of Containment

The Weight of a Box

When I first heard that passports might again be restricted to one’s “birth sex,” I felt anger rise in me. Not only for the in-necessity of it, but for the weight it puts on people already asked to explain themselves too often. The idea of having to shrink—to squeeze into an ill-fitting box for someone else’s comfort—hit me hard. Especially for some of my friends.

I get angry when limitations are put upon me too—including the ones I’ve unknowingly built myself. The quiet rules I’ve absorbed about how I should appear, act, or succeed. The walls we learn to live within can be harder to see than the ones placed around us.

But after sitting with it, I realized there are two sides to everything. One part of me burned with frustration; the other whispered, who really cares? Does a checkbox ever tell the truth about who we are? Boxes give the illusion of certainty—of knowing someone—when they mostly just flatten the infinite.

In Sanskrit, there’s a word for that illusion — Māyā — meaning “that which is not as it seems.” We move through walls and labels as though they’re solid, but most are made of perception. The box, the border, the body — they’re real enough to live in, but not real enough to define us.

We live in a containment culture. One obsessed with definitions, borders, and proof. Our systems rely on it. Our language bends around it. Even our homes are built with edges and lines to make us legible to others. But being understood isn’t the same as being known.

When we reduce someone to a label, we’re not seeing them—we’re classifying them. And yet, everyone I’ve met who lives beyond those labels—every trans, nonbinary, gender-fluid, or simply undefinable being—reminds me that life’s truest state is movement. Not fixed, but flowing. Not contained, but continually becoming.

The Architecture of Containment

Containment didn’t start with passports or gender boxes. It started with empire.

Colonialism was the first big architecture of control—built from lines, borders, and categories. It drew maps across living land and called them nations. It divided people into civilized and savage, saved and lost. The first box was the border. The next was the body.

In 1493, the Doctrine of Discovery gave Europe divine permission to claim any land not already defined by its own logic. What wasn’t on their map was declared empty—terra nullius. The vast and complex became measurable and ownable. The infinite was drawn down to scale.

Containment wasn’t just political; it was psychological. As Frantz Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks, colonialism doesn’t only occupy land—it occupies the mind. It teaches people to internalize the map, to see themselves through someone else’s coordinates. The goal wasn’t just control—it was self-containment.

That same logic still runs through our systems. Passports, zoning maps, census forms, gender markers—modern descendants of the empire’s grid. They organize bodies the way maps once organized continents. A culture of containment disguised as efficiency.

But this isn’t the only story. Long before those lines were drawn, Indigenous cultures around the world lived by a sense of fluid belonging. Land wasn’t property—it was relationship. Identity wasn’t owned—it was shared. The earth wasn’t divided into nations but held together in networks of care.

Containment, then, isn’t natural—it’s learned. And it can be unlearned.

The colonial instinct says, “Define it so we can own it.”
The relational instinct says, “Know it so we can belong to it.”

We can’t erase the old architecture overnight. But we can see through it. We can redesign it from within—one open doorway at a time.

House as Metaphor

I’ve always loved the simplicity of a ranch house—one level, open plan, a box that breathes.
It reminds me that structure isn’t the enemy; rigidity is.

Even a square can hold infinite forms if we let light through. A wall can open to a window, a room can spill into a garden, a roofline can bow to the horizon. The shape may stay the same, but the spirit inside it shifts—adapting, expanding, responding to whoever lives there.
Some people redesign the box itself—change its shape, its walls, its color—until it finally feels like home. That, too, is an act of expansion.

A box, after all, isn’t always a prison. It can also be a frame—a place to grow within, a container that reflects who we’re becoming. To inhabit a structure consciously is to use it as a teacher: it shows us where we’re still closed, where the light gets in, and where more air is needed.

I’ve seen it time and again here in the mountains—a small home becoming extraordinary not through size or luxury, but through flow: light crossing thresholds, materials echoing the land, rooms alive to change. When a home allows the outdoors in, it becomes less about shelter and more about relationship.

Maybe that’s what living beyond the box really means:
not breaking the form, but allowing it to breathe—and learning from what it teaches us.

Gender and the Performance of Form

Of all the boxes we inherit, gender may be the oldest and most personal. Before we speak or choose, the world decides which column to check:
Male. Female. A simple binary meant to contain billions of complex lives.

But gender, like architecture, was never fixed. It’s a social design drawn long before most of us were born—roles assigned like floor plans: who occupies which space, who holds which power, who stays inside which walls.

For centuries, those walls felt solid. Masculine meant structure, agency, strength. Feminine meant softness, care, containment. Each defined by what it was not. Only recently have we begun to see these as constructions, not truths—as scaffolds around something far more fluid.

The psychologist Carol Gilligan once said that patriarchy isn’t just domination—it’s disconnection. It separates men from tenderness, women from power, and everyone from wholeness. Gender containment doesn’t just confine—it divides.

My trans and gender-fluid friends live in defiance of that division. Their existence shows that identity isn’t a wall but a current. They are the modern architects of permeability—lives built between definitions.

The gender binary itself is another colonial border—drawn to simplify what was once complex. Many Indigenous cultures recognized multiple genders long before European contact: the Lakota winkte, the Zapotec muxes, the Hawaiian māhū—each understood as whole and necessary, not “other.”

Colonialism didn’t just take land; it took fluidity. It imposed order where there had been relationship.

Maybe gender, too, needs its California moment—a redesign that opens the walls, blurs the thresholds, and lets light move through. Not to erase difference, but to let each life find its own orientation to the sun.

The Law of Three

Between opposites lies creative power. I call it the Unseen Third—the awareness that arises when two forces meet and don’t cancel each other out.

Containment and expansion.
Masculine and feminine.
Self and other.
Structure and freedom.

Life moves through these polarities, not to choose sides, but to create new understanding. The challenge is to hold that tension without collapsing into either end.

We need boxes. Without structure, there’s chaos. We need them to navigate a world of billions—to deliver mail, run hospitals, issue passports. Boxes keep civilization moving.

But form isn’t soul. The danger comes when we start believing the boxes we build define us.

The art of being whole may be standing with one foot in the box and one foot out—one grounded in structure, the other planted in freedom, with the head and heart somewhere above, holding both.

That’s the Law of Three: form, freedom, and consciousness.
Body, movement, and meaning.
Box, breath, and soul.

When we live only inside the box, we shrink. When we live only outside, we lose ground. But when we hold both—and keep our head and heart awake—we become whole.

That’s why I sometimes say, if I could invent a pronoun, it would be He/They/All.
“All” means grounded yet infinite. One foot in form, one in freedom, and the heart alive in the Third.

We need the box to move through the world.
We need the open field to remember who we are.
And we need the Third to remind us both belong.

Language: The First Box

Before borders, before buildings, before even belief—there was language.

Words are the first architecture we build around reality. They give shape to the formless and edge to the infinite. Through language we define and make sense—but in naming, we also enclose.

Language helps us survive complexity. It gives thought structure, like walls give structure to space. But every word is also a small boundary—a line drawn around something that can’t be fully captured.

That’s why identity terms, even liberating ones, can turn into cages. “Man.” “Woman.” “Gay.” “Nonbinary.” The word that frees one generation can confine the next.

As Alfred Korzybski wrote, “The map is not the territory.” The word isn’t the thing itself—it’s only a model pointing toward it. We forget that and start mistaking the label for the life.

I sometimes think of language the way architect Louis Kahn spoke about light. He said, “The sun did not know how beautiful its light was until it was reflected off this wall.” Maybe language works the same way. It reflects what’s already there—it helps us see—but it isn’t the source.

So maybe the point isn’t to abandon words, but to use them lightly—to let them breathe the way a good home breathes, with open windows and shifting light.

Between the said and the unsaid is where truth lives.

The Spirit Within the Form

When I was studying architecture at the University of Cincinnati in the 1980s, I heard an art professor at Northern Kentucky University describe his near-death experience.

He said that without a body he could pass through other beings—feel what they felt, know what they knew. There was no separation, only a vast shared awareness of color, sound, and sensation. He laughed as he tried to explain it: “It was like the best sex you could imagine, multiplied by infinity.”

That story never left me. Beyond this skin, this box of bone and breath, he said, there’s a limitless field of connection.

And yet, here we are—chosen or sent—to live inside form. To learn what friction and boundaries can teach.

Maybe we even chose our starting point—this body, this family, this culture, this moment in time. Not as a limit, but as a beginning.

The box isn’t sacred because it stays the same; it’s sacred because it makes us conscious—something to measure our transformation against. The architecture of this life gives us something to push against, to shape, to fill with meaning. The soul doesn’t grow in a vacuum; it needs form to find expression.

If that’s true, our task isn’t to escape limitation but to inhabit it consciously—to remember that while boxes help us move through the world, they never define the vastness of what we are.

We are, after all, spirits learning the architecture of being human.