the perfect body

taher and i went with my parents to the Museum of Science and Industry this weekend- they have this exhibit there that is probably the most amazing one i have ever seen. it's called "Body Worlds", and it features several human bodies, actual specimen, that have been skinned and preserved in a kind of liquid plastic. and they are on stands, not behind glass or anything like that.

sounds morbid, i know. but from an educational and intellectual standpoint, it is incredibly valuable. and you get past the morbidity pretty quickly when you are standing in front of a human body. a real one. and looking at what lies beneath our skin.

i saw muscles and bone and ligaments and tendons and BRAINS and teeth and eyeballs. i saw blood vessels and nerve endings. i saw organs. i saw where it all goes, how it all fits together, in 20 or so people standing right before me, with no SKIN.

i saw what an eye looks like behind the eyelid, and realized just how huge our eyeball are compared to what we see.

i followed the sciatic nerve from its beginning to its end and watched how it branched out and become thick again. i saw what a healthy liver looks like, compared to that of a smoker. ( i vowed never to stand around secondhand smoke again. oh goodness.)

i saw lots and lots of brains and hearts and cross sections of brains and hearts and i even saw what a hip replacement looks like from the inside!

i saw a woman, 8 months pregnant, with the side of her body opened for me to see what her fetus looked like inside her, how her organs all crowded upwards in her body to make room for it. i felt more than a twinge of sadness looking at her. i felt like the cycle of life had been interrupted, that it was unnatural to look at these two people, one INSIDE the other, both there in front of me, both dead. it was shocking to me. i stood and gazed at her for a very, very long time, and even when i left her i wasn't finished. i felt the morbidity of the exhibit as i looked at that woman, but i also felt the immense presence of god in what i was looking at. i felt very sad at the potential lost, but also reverence for what she was and what her fetus was. as though by just existing, it was potential met.

i don't know. hard to articulate such a swirl of emotions. but emotional is the word for it. this exhibit didn't take us to the cellular level- it made no mention of the galaxies and universe that is within each human body, etc etc etc. it stopped at the processes and systems we can see just by looking at a person under their skin. it was incredible, and of course obvious, that without their skin, it was impossible to tell what race any of these people was. we all have yellow bones and orange muscle :)

days later, i am still thinking about the exhibit and contemplating the different things i saw. having never taken gross anatomy or done surgery or, well, skinned anyone, i was in awe. and still am.