10/02/2026
Poetic anatomy 🦋
One of my lovely friends shared an image today and asked a simple question: "What bone is this?”The shape was striking, with wings spread wide like something caught between anatomy and art. Some people said pelvis. Others said sphenoid. One person laughed that it looked like a Rorschach test, and another joked it’s only the pelvis if someone has their head all the way up their “dot dot dot.” 🤣 I nearly spit out my honey tea. And still, beneath the humor, there was something beautiful in the confusion, because it revealed a truth the body has been quietly keeping all along: these two bones, so far apart in location, share a haunting symmetry.
I love moments like this where anatomy turns into poetry without trying. The pelvic bowl and the sphenoid bone mirror each other as twin wings pressed into different ends of us. One forming the great foundation at the base of the body, the other forming a winged keystone deep behind the eyes. If you didn’t know better, you might think they were siblings drawn by the same hand. One holds the weight of our story against gravity, while the other cradles the tides of the brain and the rhythm of perception. Root and sky. Basin and lantern. Structure and starlight.
In my intraoral and cranial work, we spend time with this relationship because it is not just visually poetic; it is functionally profound. The sphenoid sits at the crossroads of the cranial base, receiving and distributing strain through the cranial bones and the dural membranes.
The pelvis and sacrum answer through the same fascial and dural continuities, like distant dancers still connected by the same piece of music. When one side is torqued, compressed, or held in an old protective pattern, the other often shows the echo. When one begins to unwind, space appears in places that seem, at first glance, unrelated.
I often tell students to think of them as two great gates of the body. The lower gate and the upper gate. When they move in harmony, fluid dynamics improve, our nerve tone settles, our breath deepens, and people feel more like themselves again without always knowing why. We begin a conversation.
So when you look at these shapes as inkblots of bone, you are not just seeing clever symmetry, but you are being given a reminder that the body loves patterns, reflections, and relationships. That balance is rarely local, and healing often happens in pairs. Sometimes the most technical anatomy, when you step back far enough, looks exactly like art. 🥰
*original image in the comments
