scratching the surface

Circling this morning, talking of how we must use care in the language that we use to describe our experience. It's impossible to tell everyone everything. And not everyone may want to hear, even if we want to tell. And there may be a point where we won't feel like telling anything at all.

I haven't been saying much the past several days as it is. As we spent the entirety of the day creating the skin, the tables were abuzz with conversation and students were floating around the room comparing form to form. Our table is on the quieter side for certain. It's not even occurring to me to say anything most

of the time. And while I keep having the intention of wandering to glimpse the work of my fellow somanauts, I never actually do, like some magnetic force isn't allowing me to stray far from Rose.

The "back" of the skin, when created from the superficial fascia, has a pattern visible to the naked eye that resembles something like a cantelope; a fibrous, fleshy basement membrane that in most locations creates what seem to be little circles or ovals...or not. Although that description doesn't really do it justice. I'm looking at something I've utterly never seen. It's like, how would a baby describe a blade of grass? It wouldn't. But it sure as hell could fix its gaze upon it all day long.

And yet this is what we're interested in: what does it look like, where does it look like what, how does it move and how does it feel and how does it compare to other areas on the same form. And we're systematically recording ALL of this so that we can have a comparison from donor to donor. Rose's skin covering the inguinal ligament has absolutely no circles at all, and maybe we find that to be true on every single cadaver. That tells us something. "Maybe that's anatomy, and we just haven't been looking at it." 

It's tricky business making skin. It's too easy to accidentally start hacking off bits of adipose that shouldn't yet be coming with. So much comes up in my silence, including my tendency toward perfectionism to which the cadaver gives a big "fuck you," and the compulsion to compare to others who seem to be doing a better job than me, which I've arbitrarily decided is 90% of the class, despite the fact that about 5 people just walked by and said the work looked great. The words are barely out of their mouths before I decide they don't know what they're talking about. And that thought is barely out of my brain before I recognize the absurdity of what's happening, i.e. the stories I'm telling myself to support the stories I'm telling myself.

I hear him at the table behind us. "Sometimes you have to be a butcher. But there are butchers, and there are Zen butchers. You can be a Zen butcher."

And sometime after that, and after lunch, I allow myself to slow down and find my groove on her lateral leg and thigh. I groove through closing time, too tired to hoop but not too tired to trek to the park on the way home and lie on a sunny hill for a little corgi to come up to sniff my face. My own thighs and legs have been talking to me for days from walking the hills, and I continue to pay attention. And continue to walk.