When I go home, there'll be a homeopathic remedy awaiting me at my doorstep, mailed from a lab that prepared it from a script delivered by a homeopath I saw on Saturday in Los Gatos. He's supposedly the best in the country, one of the best in the world, and homeopathy is one of the only therapies I haven't explored in an attempt to unravel my lifelong struggle with breath. The remedy he settled on is rare, and how I respond remains to be seen.
What's totally seen, however, is that soon I won't be drinking coffee anytime in the foreseeable future, as it's apparently an antidote to the remedy, along with camphor and a couple other random things. So with a final week remaining in the lab, so coincides the final week of my relationship with coffee. My mission? To exhaust all my coffee options before next Monday, as frequently and in as many forms as possible. So on the bus to Blue Bottle after a day of work I sit next to a man in his early 60s who tells me of how he was born and raised in San Francisco and how he loves it and loves riding the bus. "I like it on top though. Better to be on top than on the bottom, know what I'm sayin'?" For a second, I have no idea what he's sayin' because I'm reading his words as a sexual innuendo and ready to find a new seat. That's how much we've talked about sexuality and sensuality in the context of anatomy in the last two weeks, that I'm suddenly thinking this man with a cane next to me is a total perv. An instant later I realize he's talking about above-ground versus below-ground bus routes. And about living and dying. "I sure hope I still got plenty of time to be on top before they put me down below [pointing down toward the ground, laughing]."
"Eventually, I'll be way up top [pointing up toward the sky]," he says, "with the big 'G'. Or whatever your own version of that is. That's my version." It's crazy that he doesn't even know what I'm doing here and yet in a 4-minute ride he's delivering a monologue about life and death and beyond.
Much like the bus, we're full speed ahead as we enter our third week, with a lot to move through before we reach the viscera. The pace quickens to sever flesh from bone, and I have a new respect for butchers after seeing how easily meat can be made a total mess. I'm likely underselling our skills by saying that though, as Scott is carefully exposing the star of the suboccipitals, Joe is peeling back the iridescent tendinous ribbons of iliocostalis, and Wendy and I are preserving the sciatic nerves and major blood vessels down the entire length of the thigh and leg and foot. Comparisons from cadaver to cadaver abound, and quadratus lumborum is a particular curiosity--it's big and thick, or small and thick, or thin and small, or big and thin, depending on where you look. In several it's laying flat in a frontal plane, and in several more it's on an oblique angle. In most, it's clearly like a triangular sail more than a quadrilateral, having little to no leverage on the 12th rib, which is not how it's depicted in anatomy books. Piling the layers back on top of QL after its debut, it's clear how little of it is even accessible in a living form. Not diminishing the value of intention, it's simply a reality check about what we're actually touching when attempting to "work" QL as a therapist. You're likely not anywhere close to having your fingertips on it, my friend; more likely is that you're on the edge of the erectors (which are surprisingly robust in Rose) or the posterior fibers of the external obliques; even more likely is that you're in superficial fascia and not touching muscle at all.
And that's by far not the only illusion collapsing. The bodies are the teachers and we're all being schooled by the terrain we think we know so well. I've never been with such a large group of people who were so authentically willing to be proven wrong. It's nearly impossible to cling to being right when we're all being shown in every moment that there is no right. There just is. These bodies have no preference. They don't wish their variations and anomalies to be like the body across the room, and they don't wish the metal parts and pieces and staples and scars to not be there. They reject nothing. There's room for it all. There's an implicit acceptance, a constant, unwavering "yes" that they're whispering to us, the living among them. And there's absolutely no effort required from us to whisper back to them, and to each other: yes, yes, yes.
