The Ironies of Symmetry (Align)

Anyone with an artsy bone in their body has an attraction to symmetry. Whether it is offset in thirds, or completely centered and spiraling... it has been proven that beauty is somewhat formulaic. Even chaotic beauty has to have some sort of inherit balance to it in order for our hearts and minds to render it yummy. Manifest on the human visage and figure, we digest it as a sign of health, fertility even.

My father was always drawn to the arts, and as all daughters love men who remind them of their fathers, I've always been a sucker for the guys who know how to manipulate symmetry in imagery, rhyme schemes, musical instrument mastery, sports, math...whatever it might be that proves they can turn gravity into gravitas. It's like spinning straw into gold as far as I'm concerned, and it's what makes life worth living.

I spent my childhood dunking my hands into paint and covering the walls with punky expressions of my inner world as it processed the outer world - always encouraged by my father who had sewn his creative bones into the healing arts - perhaps the most creative of which is Chiropractic.

Growing up, I was surrounded by two types of people. I'll start with the ones I didn't like first. These are the people who told me that my dad wasn't a real doctor. That he was a quack. He had taken our family from rags to riches schemin... and my mother's new Chanel purse obviously had to be a fake.

Then there were the shiny people who were always telling me my father had a gift, an almost-could-be-considered magical power of healing others. Obviously, I liked standing on this side of the fence - and really didn't see what was the point in questioning it when our house was constantly filled with gifts, many handmade, thank you notes, baskets and tupperwares of food from people whose lives he had literally touched and made so much better, some even completely restored and saved.

I was proud of his ability to help others get out of pain and get healthier... he found his career incredibly rewarding, but never took full credit for everything much like a Michelango, explaining that he merely was guiding the body back to its own original divine symmetry. The body did the rest of the work... naturally locking back into healthy structure with the help of its own muscle memory. Once the bones were back in line, the organs could function strongly again... and dis-ease in all forms would just self-eradicate.

Because of people like my Dad, people suffering had options. They didn't have to have surgery. They didn't have to take drugs. They could find "alternative" methods of healing. And then my mother fell down the stairs, and thought she was paralyzed from the waist down. My father, who had never prayed to God to my knowledge, was kneeling over her body pleading and begging God to put on him whatever had been put on her. She got up and walked, he was struck down with two heart attacks and a bilateral stroke... split vertically - disabled. No more chiropracting. He has been on narcotics for 15 years now to make life sufferable. My dad, the man who devoted his life to natural healing through symmetry has been sliced in half and made dependent on chemicals to survive.

Now, it might seem that this is a tragic story - but I wouldn't ever put it in a disproportional category like that. Sure, it is heart-wrenching that my Dad has been in chronic pain and on horrible drugs for the last 15 years of his life, since he was a young 37 years old. It isn't fair that he went from healing people to not even being able to feel people, or even hisself for that matter - instead he senses a burning, as if he is too close to a fire and can't back away because his brain has scar tissue in it that can not be removed. There are billion trillion kajillion things that completely utterly depress if you want to go there... but the good that came out of all this puts it all in balance making for a true show of beauty.

So what are the good things? Well, he has mastered the ability to use pain as a reminder that you are alive, a point of departure for gratitude... That for one, is huge. I'm not sure I need to mention anything more than that to shed light on the win. I don't suffer like my father, and I know for sure, who ever is reading this doesn't have a clue what it's like to endure his pain. I know for a fact because he is a miracle in medical history. But he is no different from any of us in the sense that we all feel pain to some degree, even if it is not physical. As we all know, pain can be mental, even illogically so. And if we stop resisting that pain, we can transform it, into something better. Realizing that we are alive is harder than it sounds, but we can use pain to do this. And when you do it, your cup runneth over... it is hard to believe heaven isn't on earth, and you find the power to stop placing your better days in the future, or reserving it for some notion of an afterlife. My father has shown me how to turn tragedy into triumph.

Flip it. Turn it on its head. Win your own game.

Mos Def said it best, watch with your ears here:


When atomic matter looks like cosmic geography, when infants look like the elderly, when quiet waters make major waves, when love powers hate and all the vice versas, the ironies of symmetry align like doric, ionic, corinthian columns - holding up ancient architecture designed to give the impression of lift.

I guess the best we can do is ask ourselves what would make our lives balanced, and push the elements of circumstance into the general direction of grace. We might never manage to walk a tightrope, or hit a high note with perfect gusto... but if you ground hard and reach from your heart for the stars, you'll at least manage to get something higher than if you hadn't reached so high, or so centered, so deeply. "Yes, yes, ya'll... and we don't stop." We don't. We echo, we reflect exponentially, prismatically. We linger in shimmers, hanging dust in slivers of sunlight. We don't make fun of Catherine for writing this blog, she was not under influence other than the mere medicinal and meditative symmetries of really good hiphop beats. It's worth mentioning that songs like "Changes" by Tupac helped guide my father back into balance. His tripple vision settled back into one, as the healing power of music bandaged his neurological wounds with the symmetrical fibers of its vibratory fabric. Although he rocked his cane pretty well in those days, he didn't need it for long.