I’ve always thought of asymmetry as unstable, and occasionally unsettling. Slightly to dizzyingly off-kilter, like the horizon in an unadjusted quick shot with frozen fingers in sub-zero air. The opposite of symmetrical.
I’m reconsidering that in light of an invitation to consider asymmetry not as imbalanced, but as a different and more complicated kind of balance: “two differing sides that balance each other out.”
Not unlike a second reader, or compatible beagles, or a loving marriage. Asymmetry that brings out the best in both sides.
I may look past a vaguely queasy horizon line, and instead focus on a rocky outcropping turned midnight black to set off a riotously colorful sunrise. The opaque velvet that complements jewels, deepening their use of light to enhance their dazzlingly reflected and refracted cores.
Beneficent balance.
We may find glorious asymmetry over time and space, too–wherever the living and breathing now walk or touch down along (or grow nearby) the paths of beings who occupied them in the sometimes very distant past.
Sometimes the balance shifts. The past is restored or renewed and the present fades by shades into the background.
Old Ironsides, rebuilt and docked in Boston Harbor, where the setting sun blankets the city skyline it obscures. An ancient Spanish Galleon docked within a cobblestone’s throw of a Starbucks housed in an old Captain’s House on Massachusetts’ North Shore. A 19th Century carved Eagle freshened with gold leaf overlooking 21st Century Halloween crowds in Salem. Modern wares for sale in an ancient markets in Fez and Marrakesh. Winding Torii gates in Kyoto, where tourists look up into ancient bamboo forests that seem to converge at a point miles above them.
A single image may involve quite a few balancing acts. Day melting into night. Blazing and muted colors, both reducing to black. Budding and emptying, upright and bowed, fall and winter.
Past and present.
Mountain trials echoing with once-solid weighted steps are now carried with us as we climb alone.
It can be a delicate balance.
Love in the Spaces 