I’ve been rental hunting, something I have done very little in the last decade, but many times in my childhood. I’ve actually never lived in an house that was owned by anything but a landlord. On such a search somewhere between Junior High and High School, my mother and I toured a home with mirrored walls. Like nine foot floor to ceiling mirrored walls, with mirrored baseboard. Nearly every wall, in every room. Between the light and reflections, I was so smitten.
I was often teased growing up, about the time I could spend in a mirror. In the lens of maturity, I understand it as a lifetime of managing dysmorphic thoughts. Views? For those who suffer from dysmorphic disorders, actually see differently. Most people see faces as an entire entity. A shape with eye whites and a mouth. Bodies too, which is why throughout history we have been often distinguished by how we adorn ourselves. Those with dysmorphic disorders see faces and bodies in individual parts. Eye, nose, ear, blemish, beiges, browns, lips, teeth, tongues. Calves, nails, bunions, knuckles, collarbones, you get the idea?
When trying to hold together that many shapes at the same time, anyone would be bound to distort some, especially our own. Shapes though, have always been something I enjoyed playing with. Jigsaw puzzles, blocks, erector sets, organizing, packing and unpacking, rearranging furniture. Tetris. Moving shapes around in physical space was a game I’ve intuitively played, from very young to this day.
On some afternoon of vocabulary in elementary school, with a classroom of 7-8 year olds huddled over dictionaries, those in my group found ourselves pointing to and reading the definition of sexual intercourse, under darting eyes and hushed tones. I remember thinking, ‘That was it?’ That’s what the static channels and covering of eyes during movies and hoopla was all about? This young brain then held on to that definition, through much of my adolescence, in which I would idly configure its parts in any number of ways. Little did I realize I was toying in the importance of position to pleasure; what I was imagining and focusing on and playing with, were shapes. As though the process was much like a puzzle. Pegs in holes. Completed in multiple angles.
Intercourse between a man and a woman, where the penis is inserted into the vagina. -Webster’s, 1991
Multiple planes, multiple directions, multiple dimensions. This was before I was ever near aware of multiple speeds or participants. Focuses. Orfices. Remember I was in elementary school. Second grade? 3rd? The recognition of the reproduction aspect of this process or its deeply embedded relation to existence as a whole, was light years yet in time. I was simply being what felt mischievous. Femininely ruminating in the hormone build to puberty and beyond.
Shapes, you see, are about distinction. They are perceptual structures, representing what we ideate as boundaries. Shapes are born of lines on planes, consisting of surfaces and points, insides and outsides. All breadths. Into complexity they become depths, and all form of epithet. Ideas and minds shapes. Institutions and organizations embody ideals. Physical shape an indicator of health and robustness, in all species, all over the globe.
Geometry might be best understood as the number language of shapes. Explanation mathematically, on the design or arrangement of objects in curved and straight forms. Geometry concerns itself with form and importantly, measure. One of the first things we applied this process of measuring to was the stars. Babylonian Priests originally practiced astronomy, making it the most ancient of sophisticated and precise study. Some of the most prolific and passionate scientist of all time, have found their gaze entwined with the bodies above us.
For many this geometric pursuit in the galaxy was inseparable from the term astrology, a discipline which finds correlation of celestial and terrestrial events through the significant relationships of angles. Using projective geometry to cast charts astrologers then, in mythic and symbolic language, explain the significance of certain angles under 180 degrees. An astrological chart is a projective geometrical representation of the celestial bodies relative to a time and place on earth. Any time and place. Future or past. Because the embodiment of the planet’s shapes, and the paths they follow are that precise. That strongly cyclic, that steadfastly reliable. Each chunk of matter, orbiting our star and all the more out there, corkscrewing through existence, in predictable patterns until the gravity of the star exhausts itself and any orbit around it.
After which any matter remaining, quickly participates in a dispersing of energy, falling again into its ever slightly shifting swirls of shapes around even greater gigantic pits of gravity. Any spontaneous beginning of the cosmos, akin to a neuronic ripple upon the gravitational ‘fabric’ (think fascial goo) of spacetime; after a period of having expanded itself to near motionless again. Ever amplified into increasing planes. Peaks and troughs spun into surfaces. A Klein bottling, cacophony of toroidal hedrons in a gooie, ooohie tensegrit-ous awe. The shapes of the internal floating compression of an open system. Explaining uniform expansion, the dark form types, and energetic tension between bits of matter. To think of the motions of cosmic substance as a continuous process of recognition in all directions, in which existence comes to ever better understand itself, through forming and shaping.
Using shape to deduce what is useful. To distinguish. To learn. Shape as interaction. Shape as orientation. Shapes as response, reaction. Shape as sight, color, sound. A Cosmic radiating, continually coalesced, ordered, and dissolved, all while drifting away from itself. The embodiment of any shape, a magnified and amplified wavelength of bonds. Which form different substances. All substances. Truly neat fantastical stuff at the fundamental level.
Existence a collection of bonded energies (packets of charged and uncharged motion) in different shapes. Every shape, from particle to planetary, is an embodiment of that tis (charged and uncharged) energy that would have existed before any spontaneous eruption. As that energy explores different ways of being embodied, different ways to take shape, and the motioning involved in doing so, motility arrives: shapes of motion in motion. This facilitated by movement, the patterns of motion in motion. What we see as matter and light, ourselves included, is a coordinated dance through ranges upon planes.
Restlessly and at high speed, which is analog to is a vibratory nature which is analog to its wave particle duality, which is analog to its uncertainty. Existence moves. Where it is at any moment, and where it is going, what speed, and how and in what, as what, with what, well that’s all of the sciences since. Existence putting to use the observation of itself shaping.
Humans take shape very interestingly too. Our evolution in fact, away from our prominent mammalian physical characteristic into something incredibly distinct, was quite rapid. And our intellectual evolution is unprecedented. Our ability to take shape of our environments and our ideas, extraordinary. Toying with our existence capablilities in how we engineer our dreams. Which adds to the feeling that our free will likely about the wrangling proper of those abilities. Where any given animal will out preform a human in specific capacities: humans outperform animals in all generalities. Due to what we can willfully control. Specific muscle development outside of environmental necessity in animals, usually genetic malfunction. We use diet and/or movements to create all manners of human forms. We idolize and aim for mastery over shifts in shapes. Market rises to weather patterns to atoms.
From an advantageous adaptation of aim, sport and other practices of human movement have relied heavily on form. Form is shape prepared for movement or motility. Particles create orbiting energy fields. Cells form into bodies for this process. Both relying on an internal integrity to complete the task. As any integrity of a system fails, these systems fall into decay. And wha-lah, energy is conserved, as it begins to re-establishes its integrity in another form.
Most people might correlate form in regard to the the effective position of exercises, but form is better seen as a measure of the effectiveness of the internal integrity of a system. Look at integrity as managing the limits of tension for/in any system. In the way we understand body composition as what we are made of, our range of motions depend on our postural integrity. The shape of our spine inside our skins.
Integrity is a type of attention. The type of attention we pay inwardly and outwardly. The more simultaneous these attentions, the more steady a thing. Integrity is the measure of a beam whose width supports an entire home. It is the energy that allows for the coordinated rumination of birds or fish. The healthy resistance to that which harms. A steadfastness to that which does none. Integrity is the rope under foot, and the balance needed to transverse it. The idea that bodies arrive to this planet in many shapes is inclusive almost harmfully. More accurately, different length skeletons arrive inside squishy balls of tension, with different density capacities and muscle growth tendencies. The shape of anyone or thing from birth, comes down to nutrients for growth, movement patterns and individual attention to the integrity of them.
Shape, form and movement are the result of a gravitational influence. Stand due east and begin to lean forward, slightly. Now turn around and notice how much easier it is to fall over. That’s 800 miles an hour of momentum at your front or back. That force amplified and redirected through the weight of the planet to keep your feet on the ground. Our brains have to prioritize these directionally to remain upright. Our spinocerebeller tracts and the brain stem coordinate posture, recruitment patterns, equilibrium, tonality, and locomotion in a process known as proprioception. Functional enough unconsciously, it can also be consciously addressed.
The same way we have grammatical structure to help language embody thoughts, the body has effectively designed movement patterns. Where our range for language increases exponentially; for any given movement, new muscles are recruited for every 30 degree range that is exceeded. In healthy muscle patterns, load is dispersed evenly at every degree in the range. For a number of different reasons from injury to habit to hobbies, the body can form muscle patten dysfunction. Which then overworks some muscle in the chain and underworks others.
Usually this is in the first 30 degrees, the foundational or deepest layered muscles. For those with consistent muscle activation of the initial and end range degrees, consciously or otherwise, postural integrity, fitness, range of motion, progression and lack of injury, all increase. With any erect structure the bedrocks matter.
As geometry much the language of shape, dance a type of human movement language. Ballet atop a hierarchy of dance dialects. It’s classical form, a staple training protocol for nearly all dancers. That is because classical ballet deals with the expression of peak body line and effortless-ness. Degrees of movement consciously preform from their insertion point to full expression. Movement as grace.
Body line specifically a practice of muscle development. About the shape of the limbs in relation to the trunk. Then all of it, set spun and leaping in measured time. Ballet specifically uses muscle recruitment patterns, training the body to prioritize the early degrees and minutia of a functional body.
Efficiency to fluidity through controlled strength which leads to explosiveness. That is literally the evolution of ballet though time. Ballet’s focus on maximizing aesthetic precision through line, allows for such growth. An integrity which facilitates ever greater ranges of motion. Dance has been a part of human civilization since we lived in caves. Humans shaping themselves to the shapes of sound. As we emerged from them, it has done so with us and is expressed in many ways of movement paired to sound. Dance in general is a bit of its own physics. Peak performance of proprioception, using much the same stuff the cosmos uses to make all that we know exists.
Physical performing artist and athletes of all kinds practice the art of mastery with these concepts. Each a somewhat scientist of their own rocket, shape, temple. Embodying the aspects of the cosmic mechanics in order to accomplish this. The brain rewards the effort with fitness, strength and spinal rectitude. The best of us also strive for the same kind of quality in our ideas, thoughts and feelings. And have done so through time, because these internal and mental processes take shape too. Our mental spaces are as much planes as any physical space. The shapes there as much energy in motion. All shapes are formed within and without. The interaction of embodiment at macro and micro scales. The shape of our communities and governing bodies are the structures of ideas and lattices of morals. Like spines and psyches and buildings, they are environments built on probity.
That attentive integrity is a kind of mindfulness. That place of holding space for response over the collapse of reaction. The lack of support and integrity in our institutions ever revealed, is a reflection of the lackluster behavior we accept in ourselves. We offer ourselves. Take breathing form for starters. Something often overlooked and unsupportive. Leaving the integrity of our transverse abdominals and pelvic floors evermore unaddressed. The spines inside then less upright, less resilient, less youthful. Increasing our susceptibility, or volatility. Our inflexibility. Our vulnerability and the vulnerability of others.
Supported, vulnerability no longer a threat. No longer a worry, but a place to receive rather then lose. To appreciate that which is vulnerable, takes a type of self control. Neither fearing or taking advantage. Yet another type of integrity.
Control etymologically stems from the keeping of a record or someone who did. Originally for verifying merchant accounts. An integrity of their record. Today we think of control as an authoritarian regulation applied externally and I will be the first to agree that it is. I will also readily admit it is of our doing to a great degree. A tolerance of lack in personal integrity. The Bernay’s and the Edison’s and Rockefeller’s who began public relations relationships, based those narratives with the public on their own flaws and fears and we have since, all accepted them as our own. The shape of what exists on our planet now, depends upon what we do about that.
I’d like to encourage beginning with ever greater integrity in the shapes of all we do and are. Finding more ways to pay ourselves the internal attention we so often bypass with a focus on the external. More ways to align our feeling and words and actions. With the 364 day cycle before us, I hope for all to find the joy in upstanding spines, ideas and intentions. And if health is on your mind at the turnover of the Gregorian measure, look to the fluidity and precise, steady balance of ballet (Pilates, barre, Ti Chi) to inspire flexibility and grace in supporting your spine while overcoming any obstacles and challenges on the paths ahead.
Until the new moon. 🤍