On Interstitial Moments…
Today I'm thinking of fascia and interstitial fluid.
The ground substance that enwraps every cell.
The relational broth that the “objects” of our body float inside of.
The ocean in-between that isn’t “thing” enough to notice.
like the air, like language, like economies, like belief.
That which separates is also that which connects.
The transitional spaces, the in-betweens, the through-line.
I imagine billions of us across the world, in our houses and apartments, walking in nearby parks or forests, gathering with those we share home with, and feeling, so tangibly, the substance of the place between us.
As if the enlivened ever present six-feet were rebuilding our collective elasticity. Helping us to notice space as substance. To texture the in-between with vibrant matter. Reminding us that when you touch someone, it can, sometimes quite quickly, touch deep inside of me on the other side of the world.
What you do touches me.
Your choices, your needs, your relation to your relations, whether you are taking too much, or overtaxing your system by working when it’s time to rest… if there was ever any doubt, let it dissolve like the systems around us. We are woven together. Knit into a cocoon connected by our separations. By the ways we touch across distance.
Fascia. Threading. Woven.
In a cocoon we liquify. Return to stem cell. Become undefined. Amorphous. It is an interstitial moment. After what we assumed was solid and fixed has begun to soften and disorder, but before new forms and connections have been established. This disorganization is uncomfortable. Restructuring likely painful. We don’t know how to become something different than what we’ve always known.
Fascia forms along the lines of pull. Shaping and orienting to context. Each embryological cell knows its necessary form and function by its location in the throbbing body network of pressures and pumps. Forming along the lines of pull.
What happens when the loudest pulls are suddenly quiet? When a system that’s been straining at capacity for as long as memory allows - suddenly collapses? And the airplanes whirr you didn’t know was there goes away. And the traffic sounds and the haze in the air and the addiction to going places, to speed, to distraction…
What happens when the lines of pull that have formed us go slack? And the ways we have always needed to function - to support our family, to fulfill our role to society, to be productive contributors… to survive capitalism - are no longer functional. It’s as if the traumas of colonialism, the killer myths of separation and isolation, and all the isms they bind to them, have somaticized into a hypertonic inflammation disorder in our collective (connective) tissue. At some point, when we have gone too fast and too hard for too long, collapse is necessary. What happens when the system overwhelms and the only option is to close inward, reduce urgency, simplify, rest?
We wait, go inside, digest our own assumptions and habitual ways of operating, unwind over-bound dependencies, seek new connections. It takes time to see the invisible that has shaped us. Moses wandered in the desert for a full generation before his people could start fresh. Metamorphosis can not be rushed.
As our liquid feels out different potential shapes for reformation…
As past strategies try to re-exert their once relevant pull…
As we struggle to believe that new structures are possible…
How can we breathe space into everything?
Re-forming, with patience and clarity.
Re-membering, that form is relational.
Re-collecting, that each one of us is vital to the health of the whole
That we are inextricably “WE”
As we touch/need/entwine/in-form each other.