Fascia - the matrix of life

Photo: Maartje Visser

Exploring the scenery of fascia or connective tissue feels like entering a sacred space full of miracles.

But you may wonder: what is it?
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Fascia - the matrix of life
Fascia can be seen as as the architectural framework of physical shape.
The other name for the same thing is ‘connective tissue’. It literally connects; it is like a fabric of communication.

It is basically the tissue that sits around organs, around muscles. It penetrates muscles as well, giving them structure and resilience, allow sliding, and provide for pathways for nerves and blood vessels. Also tendons and bone are types of connective tissue.

So fascia pertains to structure.
Fascia promotes life by being its architectural building block, allowing shape, solidity, multidirectional stability, and… independence from gravity.
It literally looks like a network, like a web, like a matrix. Layered nets of fractal arrangements.

Imagine that tasty parts in a citrus fruit: it has sheets that divide it into compartments and those compartments are divided in even smaller cells, filled with liquid. The structure (connective tissue) brings order, and gives the overall form. Same with the human body. Under the ‘peel’ (skin) you can find webs of chaotically, yet organised fibrous connections.

Photo: Bas van den Eijkhof

When described poetically: the tissue look like gossamer yarns. In distinctly delicate composition it forms resilient, shock absorbing, immensely durable fabric.

More unromantic: think of a raw chicken filet, and the white-ish transparent sheets that you can lift up from the muscly meat. It’s so thin and very strong; only a sharp knife can cut through.

In contrary to a chicken breast, in our bodies the tissue is alive! It moves, with our movements and our breath.
When a body part moves, or a muscle moves, there are movements within movements within movements.
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Close-up it looks like a tingly web of fractals, with transparant threads and sheets with dewdrops traveling along them.
The segments of the web look similar, but when you zoom in in in (microscopish in) you can see tremendous diversity: interlacing strings, sails, ropes, triangles, circular forms.
Not one single spot looks like another. Just like every single snow crystal is unique and unrepeatable. Now that I find miraculous.
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Fascia is Everywhere
Similar shapes can also can be seen back in other essential parts of nature: in fruits and plants, root systems, even the web between galaxies looks like it!
And… mycelium - the oldest life form on earth, a living matter that… is truly mind-blowing… and probably has the most scientific potential to date.
I mean, the world is drooling all over technological devices - but it might very well be that mycelium is the true technology.
So I like to think of the connective tissue as the mycelium of the body.
Tuning to it, is like tuning to life itself.


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Photo: Simon Berger