Welcome to The Understory
- freebird bodywork
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
WHAT DELINEATES VIBRANCY FROM INERTNESS?
We will return to Bridges and Baskets (a series exploring the anatomy of connection and support) soon! Until then, please enjoy this very special announcement post!
I once held a human brain.
And then I held a heart.
It was 2004 or 2005, during my training at the Canadian College of Massage, when my class participated in a cadaver lab; taking bodies apart so that we might know them more fully in their wholeness.
Somewhere amid the stainless steel gurneys, the sharp tang of formaldehyde, and the relentless hum of fluorescent lights, it was suddenly there in my gloved hand: a human brain.
It was roughly the size and weight of a small bowling ball. Both of these things surprised me: it was smaller, heavier, colder than I had imagined. And greyer. The organ equivalent of congealed oatmeal, if I’m being honest.
I was underwhelmed.
Where was the mystery?
Only then did I realize I had been expecting a soft glow, a faint crackle of electricity, a pink walnut of promise.
The heart, too, appeared as an empty sac - still and cool in the palm of my warm hand. We seemed to look at each other expectantly, as though I might blink the rhythmic dance back into a deflated party balloon.
But neither organ was any of those things. I felt disappointed, a little deflated myself… until my perspective shifted.
How do these gelatinous masses become so central to our being - birthing ideas, creating art, starting wars, writing novels and love poems and theses? How do they break and burst and flicker and mend, all while housed inside our soft, vulnerable bodies?
What delineates vibrancy from inertness?
What I learned that day is something I keep relearning: life doesn’t thrive in parts. We can dissect and study the pieces that make the whole, but the magic is in the relationship.
This feels especially present now.
We are living in a time of profound disarray, violence, and confusion. Many of us are carrying this in our bodies. Our nervous systems are stretched thin, our hearts breaking again and again, our minds struggling to make meaning.
And still, we witness something else.
People coming together. Communities forming around care and resistance. Steady acts of nourishment and attention that keep something essential moving. A collective remembering: aliveness flourishes through connection.
In forests, this distinct, vital aspect of the ecosystem has a name: the Understory.
Beneath the canopy, below the drama of storms and sunlight, is a quieter realm of roots, mycelium, seedlings, and shade-loving plants. Life that sustains the whole ecosystem. Slow, relational growth sustains and renews.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what lives just below the surface in us, too. The wellsprings fed by curiosity, sensation, presence from which inspiration bubbles upward. The deep aquifers that quench thirsty hearts and minds in times of transition, uncertainty, grief and awe.
This is a potent place.
And it’s one I would love to explore with you.
From August 23–25, 2026, my dear friend and collaborator Nica Celly and I will be hosting Understory: a retreat for body, landscape, and the written word at the beautiful Ratna Ling Buddhist Retreat Centre in Cazadero, California.
Together, we’ll move and breathe, contemplate and create. We’ll listen to bodies and to land. Through yoga, pranayama, creative writing, and forest bathing, we’ll open access to these spaces, to our own personal understories - those living places that make resilience, creativity and connection possible.
More details soon. For now, I wanted to extend this invitation gently, with care for the complexity of the moment we’re living in, and deep trust in what continues to grow
beneath it all.
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