Released June 24, 2014 2:47PM

Long Beach Memorial Hospital, Long Beach California

 

my father got sick on Mother’s Day, 1963. He was

33 years old. He had an embolism near his spine,

which caused paralysis. My mother was 8½ months

pregnant with me inside of her. I was born on

June 24 th , 1963 in an entanglement of my umbilical

cord, a knot of my mother’s distress and

confusion, and a house full of crazy. Ours was a

tragic-comic wounded family. My father spent the

next year of his life trying to survive and then

rehabilitating himself at Long Beach Memorial

Hospital. My mother raised three kids all alone.

My family spent the next 50 years trying to heal

itself, lesions that scab and reopen over and over

again.

When I turned 33, I had not achieved all the

things I had dreamed of and thus began to

suffer from anxiety attacks that led to a nervous

breakdown. Part of me had an overwhelming dread

that my own health was going to echo the fate of

my father. During that strange time I was living in

a magical artist colony where a more evolved

friend of mine gave me these Hishru Balls from

Baoding, China. I don’t want to say that they

cured me, but I spun them around and around in

my hands and before you could say Bǎodìng

Jiànshēn Qiú, I was a father myself, and

henceforth had no more time for the fatuous self-

absorption of worry.