Walking to lab this morning with George Harrison's sweet voice as my soundtrack, next to a sharp-dressed stranger at least 15 years my senior with the tag of his sweater sticking out. We catch eyes and exchange a friendly smile at one street corner, and at a few street corners later exchange friendly words and a laugh, after which he picks up his pace. As he walks away, I see his superficial fascia, covering his entire form, in all it's vibrant, glowing, fluid glory. And suddenly the sweetest, most tender love and compassion is pouring straight out--for him, for all the other forms strolling the San Francisco street, for life living itself as humanity in this newly discovered layer.
Talking in circle about what layer an individual lives in and how do we meet them there and can we invite them to embody the layers they've ignored or abandoned or forgotten or feared or rejected or denied or never known; that would be the therapy--if there were to be one--arising out of this study of integral anatomy. And from what layer do we move? And from what layer are we shaped? A big belly doesn't always mean a fat belly. Fact. Rose's round belly is still a round belly after removing what turned out to be a rather thin layer of adipose; in other words, her morphology there is defined by her viscera--her guts--and not her layer of fat. Other forms around the room present differently--one woman's adipose layer is so uniformly thick that the team is giving their best shot at removing it as an entirely intact blanket; the form affectionately known to the room as "the linebacker" is revealed to still be massive in all respects even as the superficial fascia is shed; others have hardly any adipose to speak of.
Things get interesting near the axilla. Is that pec major, or something else? Is that adipose, or a mass of lymph nodes? Did I just break the bag of the deep fascia and take the lats with me in those last couple swipes? And here's what becomes clear: all those pictures in your anatomy book of muscles and their attachments? Those are all artifacts of a scalpel. Fact. I keep hearing Julian in my head saying, "Netter is bullshit," and Gil saying "That's why Netter resorted to drawing, because he couldn't get a picture of any of those things." Because they don't exist unless we craft them. And good luck crafting them, my friend. I challenge anyone to assume that task and not realize that in doing so you'd be nothing more than an artist with an agenda, fashioning something you've already decided is there after submitting to a mythology of muscle that places tissues in a hierarchy where this is important and that needs to get scraped away and discarded. Pec major doesn't just attach to the bicepital groove--there's this fibrous wing that emerges from the deep fascia covering the pecs that extends much further down the humerus to form a substantial, slippery sling with latissimus dorsi around the axilla, pocketing a racquetball-sized mass of lymph and nerves and blood vessels. And even THAT is an artifact that's been teased and poked and prodded and melted and smoothed out. So what's the chest? What's the arm? Who the hell separated these things to begin with, and why are we so attached to them? And to where we think they attach? There aren't any parts here that aren't artifacts. We're creating parts from the whole, removing them from relationship and calling them "lymph node" and "serratus" and "platysma," which, by the way, lives in the superficial fascia and isn't surrounded by deep fascia at all. Yet we still say it's a muscle. Huh? What?
Coming to terms with all of this makes it natural to let go of any concern about doing any of this "right" or "perfectly." And Gil's a model of imperfection, demonstrating his skill as well as his capacity for mistakes and fumbles at every turn--and completely, utterly, authentically comfortable with it. It all takes care of itself, and it's all taken care of. No need to worry. No need to get upset. Nothing's a problem. And I realize at the end of the day that the filthy tray of tools that was bothering me so much the other day is no. Big. Deal. I even offer to clean everyone's instruments, and Wendy washes the ruler and the tray along with me. Scott finishes the documentation and Joe wipes up the table and tucks Rose in goodnight. It's all taken care of.
