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.

Deconstruction/Reconstruction - a lame addiction or a fancy dance?

I don't have a subject in mind.  I'm just going to start typing.  I'm feeling like writing in a way that would help me to unleash a little sadness.  I feel it banging on my ribs.  Swelling behind my eyes.  I have no idea where it is coming from.  Well, of course I do.  I could name ten things quicker than I could name nine things... couldn't we all?  But, what I realized when I was a late teen living in Holland doing what Americans in Holland do... is that we systematically ignore things because we have strategy, not necessarily because we are in denial.  

I mean there were many times in my life when I would sob so hard I was looking like a set of great dane jowls.  Wah wah wah wah wah... and where did it get me?  The next day, I'd think, "Why did I even go there?  What did I get out of that?"  At first it seems so brave and courageous to dance with the boogie monster, but it's like hooking up with a guy you long ago realized has nothing to offer and always leaves you broke.  Don't do it!  Realize your own tactics once you acquire them.  I truly believe that I have a strategy to my ignorance towards myself.  

There are certain things that will always (always) make me sad and there is nothing I can do about them, so why let myself go there?  What I'm thinking might be more powerful than pulling off the sexiest dip with the boogie man, is instead walking right up to the line between you and your sadness, pressing your face against it in a painful Jim Carrey style contortion  (if you don't know what I'm talking about, just pretend to smell your tooth and be disgusted by it), and finally, snarfing a snot rocket right on the window of that helpless closet of your soul.  Yes I declare laughter is the cure.  

I am venturing to believe that there is something funny about everything.  I don't care how sad it is.  I don't care how sweet it smells.  I don't know what the funny things are about the saddest things I've got haunting me, but I'm going to try to figure it out.  I'm trying to really hard right now, and it's making me want to slap myself across the face, but I'm gonna push through this exercise and see if it results in any sort of new muscle tone.  Along the way, I might also have to chuck a few stuffed duckie toys at the wall with the intensity of a rhino - that one's for you Holly : )

I think my blog posts are getting weirder and weirder.  But seriously, think of your favorite funny movie, and then insert the most tragic scenes of your life into it.  I know it feels wrong, careless, wreckless and cowardly even, but just let yourself for a moment imagine that it its a celestial road less travelled, a procession towards the heights of the most vertical labryinth, and that all of the world's followers will begin to grab onto your coat tails like it was an f-ing magic carpet ride.

I'm starting to wonder if I'm becoming an escape artist or a life artist.  Perhaps that is the thinnest line.  Thinner than the line that runs between passion and grace.  But really, is there any purpose for sadness?  Does it serve anyone?  What is the point of it?  That it shows us how much we had?  What good does it do to recognize what you had.  We only have time to recognize what we have, right?  Is there time for anything else?  

But there it is, still in my ribs, still behind my eyes.  What is it trying to tell me?  What does it want me to do.  The tears want to come out like tea in a boiling kettle.  It's another one of those nights where for no singular alpha reason am I about to blow.  

Isn't it a bit like yoga.  Sometimes I wonder about yoga.  Does it really make you feel that great?  I mean, when you walk out of the class, do you feel great, or is it just so great to feel the way you feel when you're not doing yoga.  You contort yourself into the most uncomfortable positions, and then when you're out of them, they're telling you you should feel great.  But maybe it's just a roundabout way of appreciating what it feels like to just feel the way you normally feel.  

Same thing with having some sort of emotional release.  Does it really feel that good when it's over, or does it just feel so much better to be how you normally are after throwing yourself through the fires of hell?  Is the only way to feel great about ourselves to break up with our togetherness, fall apart, and put ourselves back together?  I'm beating a dead horse.  Or am I avoiding doing just that?

In deconstruction/reconstruction is there really a release or is it actually the opposite of a release.  Is it a reception? Oh hell, it's both, simultaneously.  Those wise men and their two opposite truths being true at the same time.  I'm all dorked out.  Time to go google the science of tears.  

Of course, now that we have our own grove, you're gonna call us lesbians haha

Men forget that the definition of a feminist is someone who believes we are equal, not that we are greater than men.  Unfortunately, we still live in an age where a woman has to have her femininity stripped away from her if she wants to be recognized as equal to a man.  Extraordinary women who don't take shit and sustain their own livelihoods are hardly ever seen as beautiful, soft, or sensitive.  Instead, they are denounced as lacking sexuality, femininity, described as hard, cold, and selfish. This all too common perception of successful women defeats the ability for us to claim that we have become equal.  Real men can revere us as sexy, illustrious creatures without having to cut away what makes us different from them in order to see us as equal to them.  Any other version of a male, the kind who has to project his own masculinity onto us to give us credit for what we are capable of, is not a man, but rather a coward, a child, and a lost little boy. Possibly even a homosexual, and quite usually.  And even worse are the women who out of their own insecurities, ineptitudes, and jealousy jump on the rat-a-tat bandwagons of these poor excuse for men and spit on us, the purveyors of their born and unborn daughters' future, becoming more like homosexual men than like women themselves.  This is a tough time to know what makes us women.  I say, if it makes you feel strong, if it makes you feel sexy TO YOURSELF, if it makes you weightless, and launched, it makes you a woman.  If it makes you feel accomplished, proud, and most imporantly IF IT MAKES YOU FEEL BRAVE, it makes you a woman.  And to our lesbian friends out there, the same goes for you!

This is my response to the people who are calling me and my womanly colleagues lesbians for being a part of the Belezian Grove.  We're not the ones who are running around naked in Napa in the name of "brotherhood".  Sounds a little fruity to me.  Us girls, we just sip swanky cocktails and come up with real solutions.  Where are all the real men????  

Colbert demands to be invited to join the Belizean Grove. The piece starts at 5:56!
http://www.hulu.com/watch/78416/the-colbert-report-wed-jun-17-2009

Let me know what you think!

Am I really a blogger?

Soooooo.... it appears that even though I've only posted a few entries, I'm already getting recognized as a blogger. I have to admit... I'm super excited about it! Not since I was rapping (haha check out my old tracks: City Town), have I had a channel to really express myself. I encourage all of you to start your own blogs and hang your storage compartments in the wind - liberate your thoughts! Share! It's incredibly cleansing.

I used to experience mental/emotional/spiritual constipation if I did not write in my diary every night. I'm not sure why I stopped writing in a diary, but it probably has something to do with how much emailing started to take over my communicative energies. I type like a pianist, and don't miss a beat of the thought process, so it's a much better way to capture the tides. I'm looking forward to creating goals for myself for how often, and how profoundly I blog.

Helping me to reach both of these personal goals is an awesome opportunity that has presented itself– Next week I will be blogging from the Sustainable Brands Conference in Monterey, CA on June 3rd for Link TV's CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) site. I'll be sure to link in this crowd to that crowd, and vice versa - though I'm not really sure my professional colleagues are interested in hearing about how I don't like to go to pee inside.

Hopefully I'll have the chance to connect with some of the big characters that day including Tom Szaky from TerraCycle, Steve Glenn from LivingHomes, Gil Friend from NatLogic, Kellie McElhaney, Exec. Director, Center for Responsible Business at Berkeley, and many others!

If there's something you would like me to ask any of these crusaders, just let me know! I'm so excited! This will be my first actual blogging gig! Word to my mom!

Primitive, Creative & Repressed

Not a good combination. Gonna write this one with "Weird Fishes" (Radiohead) on repeat.

I want to work with my hands. I want to feed babies. I want to feel the grass under my feet all day and pee outside. I'm sick of toilets.

I want others to describe me as visceral, instead of me describing myself as visceral.

If my dreams could be my life, I'd have squashed berries on my lips instead of designer gloss - what a farce! I should take my Chanel mascara tube and use it to grind up pieces of corn on a rock! I should've never cut my hair. It should be snarly and gold from the salt and the sun. Sea salt bath scrub, $38 from Sephora. Who am I? Why are we paying more for the things we can make ourselves, and less for the things that kill us?

There's a reason I was mesmerized by my favorite movie, The Blue Lagoon, and my favorite book, Island of the Blue Dolphins when I was little. Life counted by many moons. Nothing to exhaust you other than the toils of simplicity. Meeting basic needs with your own body and mind. Imagine what that would do for the soul.

I want to sink my fingers into some pottery on a wheel right now. I want it more badly than my teeth wanted the food I had on my passenger seat on my way home from grabbing lunch to-go today.

I want a house made out of palm, and some damn stars in the sky. What the hell have we done?
What have I done with myself? I'm ready to pack a bag and head for the equator....

The more things change, the more they stay the same

My friend told me the other day that she had heard that aborigines just can't survive in our modern world. Between the visual and sonic pollution, the cell phone rays, the obesity of the electromagnetic field... she said they just cant take it, and it can cause their bodies to just shut down.

I've heard other weird anecdotes, like: Children these days aren't getting obese from eating fast food because DNA has now evolved to be able to process all of the unnatural toxins and chemicals my generation grew up shoving into our bodies.

So if one generation at a time our genes are learning how to cope with the chaos that makes up modern life, I guess it makes sense that people who haven't gone through these stages of "evolution" (not sure you could call it that) can't survive in this carnival we call life in America.

Although I love the smells and bells that come with city life, I couldn't take living in the heart of the city anymore. After years of being sure it's what I wanted, I found myself moving westward to the outskirts of LA and settling more deeply into life in Venice. Although it's still considered part of a city, it feels more like a suburb. Back in Hollywood, I couldn't even find a bush to let my dog pee on.

Here in Venice, I have a backyard with a tiny garden, and perhaps the best part of my day is when I go outside and check in with it. It's a space where I'll have one of those moments where I'm just staring at my hand reveling in the fact that I exist. I'll realize it so profoundly that it freaks me out. Something about the smell of tomato leaves really grounds me into being.

I imagine that if any aborigines actually died while visiting a modern civilization it is because they were completely unable to stay connected to their sense of self. Are those of us who live what we consider to be "regular" lives "evolving" in ways that protect us from our loss of self despite our ADD and overwhelming surroundings? If the aborigine had been protected with an ipod that was playing his/her favorite drum beat, would he/she have managed to make it through another day?

My uncle thinks that we are all turning into numb drones. He is disgusted by the way kids walk around hooked up to cell phones and ipods. He says it looks like we are wireless walking machines with USB inputs as opposed to bodily orifices. I believe these bubbles that we create for ourselves with all of our mobile devices are actually our way of taking our identities with us as we crusade into the shmorgasborg of othernesses.

In addition, our mp3 players and iphones (or if you're like me you made a political statement and bought the android google phone) are our ways of staying connected to those who we love and cherish. At first it seemed like Twitter was a retarded concept - but now we are starting to use it because it's actually a really good way of keeping track of your favorite people as they float around the veins of the matrix that are obstructed from your present position. Years ago the words "online community" sounded so bleak and lifeless. Today, we tap into our various online communities to feel recognized, understood, validated. It is sometimes the only place we can go to feel like we have a voice...

A day later, you might find out that someone you didn't even know was listening. You might make a friend you will never meet in "real life". You might fall in love in 2D. You might talk to your Dad and manage to engage with him more profoundly than you ever did in person. I'll be the first to admit there's been a countless number of times when I've experienced tear-filled breakthrus while sitting in front of a silly computer screen.

And you might look like a lifeless drone while you are having one of these moments... and you might have to remind yourself to get out and deal with the bar scene before the weekend ends. Perhaps it would be more socially acceptable to get wasted and cry on a street corner while you friend prepares for you to puke all over her new shoes. When you're far away from home, and your friends are moving pieces, this world we've created online becomes a major lifeline.

I enjoy when I know everyone I love is safely tucked into bed and I can turn off my cell phone. I like the quiet of Venice (save your every-other-month shooting) compared to the non-stop chaos of Hollywood. But when I wake up in the morning and I've got a virtual pile of notes from my friends, family, and what I'll call "cyberkin", I feel proud to have found a balance between old and new that really keeps my life full and filled. Tomorrow if we get invaded by aliens, or if we get blasted back into the stone age, I believe I'll find a way to be happy with either side of the equation. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Reason My Black Background Is Blue

For those of you who read my last post, The Reason My Background Is Black, I'm hoping you had a chance to watch the video about PSPs on Saatchi & Saatchi S's facebook page. If you did, you might've made yourself squirm a little by thinking, "Maybe she should've named that post "The Reason My Black Background Is Blue". Well, for this post, I absolutely had to. And to be sure you all understand why, I recommend watching The Birth of Blue. This is a video of a speech that Adam Werbach, Global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi S, gave to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco as a fulfillment to his promise that he would return with some solutions for his speech given four years prior entitled, "The Death of Environmentalism".

This "eulogy" as Adam referred to it, addressed why he had decided to move out of the non-profit world and into the belly of corporate America, or should I say, Earth. When Adam was 23 years old, he graduated from Brown, and was handpicked to become the president of the Sierra Club by David Brower. This made him the youngest president of the largest and oldest non-profit in America. Adam became every activist's golden child, and the same people who had revered him would come to revile him when he made the decision to go and work for Walmart.

After watching, The Birth of Blue, the way I understand his justification for "selling out" is that Adam began to see that the world was not coming up with good enough solutions to face the huge crisis we face. He said, "When you want to steal some money, you go where the money is and rob a bank. When you want to create change, you go to where the people are. You go to the corporations". One out of every 100 people in America work for Walmart. He likens it to the story of David & Goliath - and in this scenario, he is David, crawling into the belly of the beast.

Change, needs to come from the inside out. I was discussing this with my friends Libby Patterson & Paul Kardash of the Eco-Alliance as Paul clobbered around in Libby's glittery pink stilettos. Paul jokingly exclaimed, "We should call Adam and tell him that he should've called it the Birth of Pink." I was thinking, hmmm... I guess part of the speech does focus on how women make the majority of household purchase decisions. We are absolute animals when it comes to finding a deal, and caring about what goes into our bodies, and the bodies of our loved ones. But Libby had a better take on the idea and delivered it in perfect Libby-empress-style, "That's good Paul," she said, "Because change needs to come from the inside out." I didn't realize that this is why Paul had suggested pink. Isn't it great when two intelligent people fall in love, and even better when you get to hang out with them?

I diverge...
The point of this post was to explain why my black background is actually blue. "Blue", in case you didn't watch the video(s) yet, is Adam's definition of what happens when you find a way to make green personal - which is really the only way we can affect change as individual regular people. What are your passions, what do you care about... how can you relate to the problem and engage in making the world a better place by shifting one tiny action that you repeat in your everyday life? I know, I know, you're all saying, well, "If I turn off the faucet while I brush my teeth, is that really going to save the world in any way!?" - and I hear you on that, but what I hear more loudly is the echo of a beautiful story I stumbled upon somewhere in my cyber-surfing recently. Maybe it was in The Birth of Blue - you tell me... it goes something like this ( I found this similar version of the story on Google taken from Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul):

A friend of ours was walking down a deserted Mexican beach at sunset. As he walked along, he began to see another man in the distance. As he grew closer, he noticed that the local native kept leaning down, picking something up, and throwing it out into the water. Time and again he kept hurling things out into the ocean. As our friend approached even closer, he noticed that the man was picking up starfish that had been washed up on the beach and, one at a time, he was throwing them back into the water. Our friend was puzzled. He approached the man and said "Good evening, Friend. I was wondering what you are doing."

"I'm throwing these starfish back into the ocean. You see, it's low tide right now and all of these starfish have been washed up onto the shore. If I don't throw them back into the sea, they'll die up here from lack of oxygen."

"I understand," our friend replied, "but there must be thousands of starfish on this beach. You can't possibly get to all of them. There are simply too many. And don't you realize it is probably happening on hundreds of other beaches all up and down the coast. Can't you see that you can't possibly make a difference?"

The local native smiled, bent down, and picked up yet another starfish, and as he threw it back into the sea, he replied, "Made a difference to that one!"

So this cheesey soup is being fed to millions of Walmart employees, and they are all picking their own PSPs (Personal Sustainability Promises). The reason my black background is blue is because it saves watt hours, which is also green, but what makes it blue is that it's not huge. It's small. It's probably insignificant. But knowing that and choosing to do it anyways is the shift that needs to happen in all of our hearts. That means we need to reach down deep and sense how we are all connected, how if we all turn our cheek, this blue planet will dry up and make a Mars out of itself.

If we each picked a starfish to throw back into the water, I'm sure we could save all of the starfish.

If we don't find ways to help, we'll be wishing we were starfish because we'll be drowning in seawater! That's not really the blue we want. Let's make blue what we want it to be. Deeper than green. Deeper than pink. Deep deep down into the source of what connects us all, the fact that we matter, the fact that unless we believe we count, we won't.