deep

Sitting next to Peter in circle this morning, "You have to stop showing up in my dreams," he says. He dreamt encountering me in lab; from my front, all was copacetic, but somehow I had managed to entirely dissect myself on the posterior, flesh and vessels and nerves jangling out behind me. He said that while I was "cool with it," he was pretty disturbed, especially since other aspects of the dream were tainted with elements of a dark and twisted tone.

Odoardo Fialetti, Tabulae Anotomicae

Something's shifted. Something's begun to settle in. And I mean in. Inward, it's settling, and I'm tending to keep to myself more. Like everything is expanding in, and very little extending out. It doesn't feel avoidant and it doesn't feel frightened, it just feels natural. And also unavoidable. 

We're at the level of the deep fascia now, defined in simple terms as that which is beneath the superficial fascia. Lacking deposits of adipose, the tone changes, the texture changes, and it shows up differently from region to region. On the thigh, it shows up silvery and thick and strappy as the fascia latae. On pec major and glute max, it shows up as the filmy, nearly transparent epimysium of the muscle below, deeply invested in the red, meaty fibers. Near the lumbar spine and sacrum, well, Scott and I fumble through the darkish, strongish, fibrous, stripey-looking tissue, thinking we've mistakenly cut through to muscle and made what looks like hamburger meat before calling Gil over. Where's the thoracolumbar fascia?

"Well, it depends on what you want to call the thoracolumbar fascia." He shaves and scrapes until he lands at least 10cm deeper than we had, revealing a whitish silvery sheety tissue below that, upon further clearing away, pours from the spine and gives rise to the left lat: "That's the thoracolumbar fascia," according to Netter and muscle charts and anatomy books everywhere. Neat, clean, smooth, pretty. Then he points to the hamburger meat: "Do you want to tell me that this gristly, messy, fibrous flibbity isn't the thoracolumbar fascia too?" His point is clear. "But to be fair, who'd want to take a picture of that?"

He hangs out for quite a while, talking about how the deep fascia offers stability and holds a record of our experience in the world, and my eyes are tearing up but not enough that I can't continue to watch and listen. I've felt on the verge of tears all day after taking to lunch alone because all I wanted to do was drink a cafe au lait out of a huge bowl with no handle and eat sweet potato pomme frites at La Boulange and sit and write. And for the first time in a couple months comes the desire to meditate for more than the hour in the morning, and the pull is strong. 

So after grabbing bleu cheese and fig jam at the store on the way home, and after having a salad with a few others at the hotel, I sit. And the settling of the deep fascia continues, the darkness full of dimensions and the sensations both growing and thinning simultaneously. "What are you going to do with all this [knowledge and experience] when you get home?" my friend asked me the other day. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it, Heather. But I have a feeling that it's going to do something with me.