The Point and the Twist

I used to think life was a circle.
I’m a mathematician – everything is a circle.
People speak in cycles.
Days spinning into weeks. Seasons folding into years.
Grief, love, growth – all coming back around like clock hands.
A never ending sin wave. ( I mean that mathematically and spiritually)

But cycles can be deceptive.
Turning into perpetual phases.
They look like they’re going somewhere, but they return to themselves.
That’s what drew me to the twisted trefoil as my logo
not a closed loop, not a flat repeat, but a threefold knot with direction.
It’s infinite in motion, but not aimless.
It has a POINT.
It took years to understand why that mattered.

I kept arriving at something, a sensation, a revelation, a Point, but each time I reached it, I didn’t trust it. It felt too poetic, too aligned, too complete. So I’d doubt. Start again. Try another angle.

I’ve approached the Point through stories and statistics, through theorems and theology.
Through emotions that wouldn’t yield.
Through songs like Tool’s Lateralus, where time spirals on Fibonacci’s breath, and through the sanctified solo of Maggot Brain, where Eddie Hazel’s guitar seemed to split heaven open for just a moment.

My grandmother taught me to pray with her 8-track.
She played B.B. King and Johnny Cash like she was tuning into the divine.
My Ernie, my paw-paw was a one-eyed drunk, who had been an engineer before racism took his eye and sent him to gin. A common tale for many black WWII vets. He taught me to do math on the table. Yes, my first and best math teacher slurred when he said ‘division’.
I didn’t know much that drunk would matter – I only knew it felt right to listen to him.

His twists and turns always leading to a point.
My mom gave me courage of conviction.
It came with a price, but the debt has been paid.
No one grows without learning to transform the points plotted at birth.

Later came the formal language: Jesuits, logic, Greek, Latin and
different mathematics. Chaos, knots and rings with
proofs so beautiful I wanted to wear them as tattoos.
But no matter how elegant the path, I always reached the same Point
then doubted, then walked on.

Until one day, the loop broke.
I felt something shift.
Not in my intellect, I’d mapped the whole terrain by then, but in my body.
A tremble. A release.
A quiet knowing: this cycle is complete.

And with that came the Seven Twisted Trefoils.
They didn’t replace the original. They revealed it.
Showed what the single trefoil had always been pointing toward: completion.
Seven symbols. Seven years. Seven layers of letting go.

I arranged them in a cycle, not to repeat, but to signal a turning.
And because I am still a mathematician and we like circles.
Each trefoil colored differently, a note in the full spectrum of human experience.
The first one points to 6 o’clock, to F♯ on the Circle of Fifths, to 270° on the Unit Circle.
A musical and mathematical orientation.
A signal that this time, I’m not just spinning, I’m aligned.

You see, the standard trefoil is a chiralChirality /kaɪˈrælɪtiː/ is a property of asymmetry important in several branches of science. The word chirality is derived from the Greek χείρ (kheir), "hand", a familiar chiral object. A More knot.
But the Twisted Trefoil is not quite.
One side has a Point – a direction.
Once you twist, there’s no going back.
And maybe that’s what faith really is: the courage to stop doubting the Point when you reach it
even if it looks different than you expected. Especially then.

So now I teach the geometry of belief.
Not from a loci on a circle, but from the T.I.P.

That sacred asymmetry is not a flaw – it’s a feature.
That spiritual alignment doesn’t mean going in circles, but recognizing when it’s time to complete one and start the next.

I carry my Twisted Trefoil with me.
Sometimes as one.
Sometimes as seven.
But always twisting- always moving – always forward.
Always with a Point.
Becoming the Truth In Performance.

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