The Wheel Turns

From Faust to Frankenstein, the alchemical urge lives deep in us all. The power to transform is magic. We see it in Nature and imagine ways we can harness this power for ourselves.

Both life and the wheel of the year are cyclical. They revolve and evolve, phasing into and out of different rhythms and energies at different times. Samhain, usually halfway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, is traditionally a time to remember ancestors and those whose lives have transitioned beyond our plane.

Cycles by definition are not linear. Life has found a way to exist on the edge of instability because it dances in and within feedback loops that self-sustain. The balance requires participation. Every healthy cell in your body operates to maximize its advantage while also existing symbiotically with other cells. By contrast, humans have been operating as though a linear materials economy that extracts ever more resources from the finite supply of the earth for the sake of growth is sustainable. A closed-loop materials economy in which the “waste” can be meaningfully converted to new stuff reflects a regenerative model more in line with the cycles of the living world. There is no more obvious nor alchemical an example of this in Nature than healthy soil, for to dust we shall all return.

Death is a part of the cycle of life. Your carbon will be recycled, but the choice to create more light in the world is yours. This principle applies to everything from earlier versions of ourselves to nurse logs and whale falls. This month a full moon illuminates a thin veil. Honor the past, cherish the soil, cultivate the fire of transfiguration to temper the future, fear not the dark, and memento mori.

A Broader Horizon

In The Art of Racing in the Rain, the main (human) character Denny shares a secret he learned when racing cars in Italy: "La macchina va dove vanno gli occhi." Loosely translated, the car goes where the eyes go.

So too with the vehicle of our bodies and the instrument of our minds. Consider the essential behavior of hand-eye coordination. From bowling to baseball, yarning to yoga, our ability to track and translate the movement of our body to effect change on the external world requires we see the action as we perform it. It also highlights the importance of having direct experiences in the physical world. Nature pushes back in a real and meaningful way. The hyper-novelty of the modern era continues to draw us away from direct, physical experiences and toward screen-mediated virtual ones. I contend that the conversation that occurs between the body, the mind, and the environment is diminished when we over-inhabit digital space.

Our brains prioritize keeping our sightline horizontal. Our sense of balance is predominantly influenced by sight. The multi-sensory array of organs that allow us to perceive the real world is concentrated in the head, so our brains want to know where we are in space.

Literally and figuratively, we see where we are going because it is often where we are looking. To the extent that we allow our field of vision to include a broader horizon, we can approach a more expansive experience.

I believe that the art of chiropractic offers a philosophical, evolutionary, and expansive perspective. Beyond bones and muscles, chiropractic interfaces with the neurological, immunological, and psycho-emotional aspects of inhabiting a human body.

When things aren’t working we tend to look down and watch our feet. I invite you to consider what else you might see by looking up and opening the aperture of your perspective.

De Nova Stella

Prior to 1572, the Aristotelian view of a perfect and unchanging heaven was accepted science for two thousand years. Unlike the turbulent terrestrial and meteorological events of the sublunary sphere, which contained Earth, the stars were fixed. Earlier in the century, Copernicus placed the sun in the center and Kepler described the ellipses of orbiting planets. It was an amateur Danish astronomer named Tycho Brahe who reported something that would further revolutionize the way that humans were to understand the cosmos. The appearance of a “new star” in 1572 disrupted the classical and religious view that the heavens (the sky beyond the moon and planets) were immutable. By using parallax, he was able to use measurements from different observatories to determine that the position of the new star did not change relative to other stars, which meant its distance must be well beyond the moon and not within the turbulence of the Earth’s currents.

Parallax can be used to measure the position or relative distance of objects from the observer. While its use in astrometry is obvious, I think it also provides an excellent metaphor for perspective. If 2 people are looking at the same thing and the distance between them is small, what they are looking at will appear similar. If 2 people are looking at the same thing and the distance between them is large, what they are looking at will appear to have to a different background and they will be observing a potentially different side of the same thing.

If we are talking about objects in (outer) space, the mathematics should resolve the perceived differences. But what if we are talking about the perception of events closer to home? The relative distance between people can be influenced by everything from age to ideology, gender to geography, and education to economy. It is essential to recognize that no one of us has access to or could even see the Big Picture. As scientific advances have and will continue to disrupt what we know about our place in the universe, it is my hope that we can together temper the light of new stars to illuminate the path forward.