Feets of Strength and Movement

Worlds. Microcosms to the human body. Griots indicating without censor the secret history of their owner's body. Remote spies describing position and weight. Weird things attached to an otherwise streamlined endeavor that produce more debate than resolution. Seldom understood, often hidden out of shame, sometimes hate. Bound by doctrine and fashion, unbound by the same at rare times. Miracles of engineering that compromise between stability and mobility. Thought to be stinky. The human foot is a living thing, and for so many it is suffering, wilting in neglect.

Where do we begin with our feet? Deep inside your shoe lies a beast of myth. What is this thing? How do we use it?

Twenty six bones a pop blossom from the distal union of tibia and fibula, the two bones of the lower leg that constitute the medial and lateral malleolus respectively, like a bird of paradise from its stalk. They form articulate arches that negotiate the need to stand with the need to move.

They rest on the talus, our uppermost foot bone. It is a beautiful bone, covered in fascia, connected only to other bones, and it is the only bone in your body completely unattached to muscle. The talus rests on the broad platform of the calcaneus, your heel bone, almost like a mortar in a pestle, and translates forces up from the foot into the body, and down from the body into the foot. It is like an elegant diplomat, gliding among compressive and sheer forces.

From here the tall us meets the navicular

the navicular's dense half moon shape extends towards our big toe

while the boxy cuboid manages the pinky toe side. They express the divergent trajectories responsible for producing the foot's landing and toe off, it's pronation and supination. Together they bookend, thus stabilizing and managing three dense boxy cuneiform bones, which negotiate the values of mobility and stability within the foot.

These transmit force in sequence into the five metatarsals, and these transmit kinetically and structurally into the phalanges. Like an impatient rapping of the fingers on a table, the 5 metatarsals carry the ripple of the foot's lateral rocking across the the foot, beginning with the pinky toe side, and moving through the market piggy.

1 hour