Dirk Marivoet, MSc, PT, PMT, ECP, CCEP
Editor’s Note: In this “lyrical essay”, Dirk Marivoet explores the kinship between John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and the somatic language of Core Strokes®. Through the meeting of word and fascia, he reveals how both poetic naming and therapeutic touch give voice to unspoken emotion. A meditation on breath, empathy, and embodiment, it invites readers to feel language as a living tissue where sorrow transforms into resonance.
The Secret Names of Feeling
Every language begins as breath. Before alphabets, before the first word was carved into clay or inked onto paper, someone exhaled a sound trembling with meaning — a cry, a hum, a sigh— each born from a body touched by life. The ancients believed that to name a thing was to call its spirit into form, and that to speak a word was to shape the invisible so that another could feel it.
Yet countless experiences pass through us nameless. They brush the edge of consciousness like wind through tall grass — felt but not yet formed. A sudden ache when a stranger smiles. The vertigo of being seen. The small grief of beauty already too perfect to hold. These are the “obscure sorrows,” the half-tones of being that John Koenig gathered into his improbable lexicon.
Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is less a book than a listening instrument.
He listens with a poet’s body — attuned to meanings that vibrate before they become words. He leans toward the unsayable and hears it whisper its own name. Sonder. Opia. Chrysalism. Words that feel as if they had always existed, waiting for the right temperature of compassion to crystallize.
Each of these words opens a door between inner and outer, the personal and the cosmic. They are linguistic fascia — thin membranes of empathy that connect isolated organs of experience. When we speak them aloud, the breath itself becomes connective tissue.
The fascia also speaks in textures: Warm Honey, Streaming Silk — sometimes Gritty, sometimes Mud — each carrying its own story of resistance and release. Where Koenig found syllables, I found touch; where he invented language, I discovered tone. Both of us entered the same temple — the threshold where sensation turns into meaning and meaning dissolves back into sensation.
To read Dirk’s essay, please click here
