Falling and the Gravity of Desire
Dear Friends and Family,
Welcome to you who are new! I’m so glad you’re here.
I have been hugging the northern shores of Lake Superior since I last wrote. And I have gathered but a few images. National and provincial parks have closed for the winter, nighttime temperatures now hovering around freezing. The world gets fuller the farther east I go. It’s an adjustment from the nascent nativity of the past months. The surprise answer to the longing for that wild innocence has been the sound of children laughing and playing in neighborhoods where I have landed the past few days.
Where go I? The weather looks favorable to continue east along the northern shores of the Great Lakes, Lake Huron on the near horizon. I may reach Quebec by end of week.
I am now landing most nights at the homes of folks who generously welcome me, providing a place to park and plug in to run heat.1 Without their hospitality, there would be few options this far north this time of year. To you reading today who have hosted me along the way, old friends and new, Thank you. When I look back on this journey years down the road, the places I will remember resting my head at night will not be campgrounds or wild boondocking spots. The places I will remember will be the ones where you welcomed me home for a day or two.
. . .
Your responses in comments last week inspired this week’s reflections. In the same way that I often weave words around the works of others, this week, I wove words around yours. And while I call out what
, , and shared, I was also holding the words of all of you who commented or sent emails to me. I love where you have taken this autumn inquiry on falling.Ever in gratitude and with love,
Renée
Falling and the Gravity of Desire
a moment of mesmery
Rain falls, tapping a tin-can melody on the roof of the van. It is a slow rain, a rain sure to linger, emptying the sky over Lake Superior of its slate-grey weight. Down by the marina, the horizon disappears into a misty blur. It was the same yesterday when the sun shown. Only, it was blue not grey, the color of sky that of water and water that of sky. Along the shore, the lake danced with ripening trees so saturated with red, I felt my mouth water.
Water. Watch it gravitate toward shore. See it dance by a force within and beyond, undulations of one body—all of it touching the eye and so, it too, must surely be touched through the back and forth ripples of light.
Watch water draw close to itself in the sky. See clouds stroke blue with white then grey and greyer still until something inside says fall. It says time to go home. It says let my longing for Earth feel Earth longing for me, the weight and touch of me.2
It is said that untold numbers of tiny little lives—microbes we call them—have a role to play, that they cue the cloud to let go of itself; all of them all at once—microbes stirring simultaneously like a murmuration of starlings, and not one not two but countless clouds respond to the call: let go. And just as soon, what water clung to itself in a sea of sky now comes tumbling down. Rain, we call this turn from floating to falling.
Is it not so of mammalian birth? That the infant gives a cue and womb lets go? At the very least, we should say some favor between mother and child is at play for life to fall into first breath.
Ed told us a story told by Philip who said while dying, We are falling, all of us, falling. We are all, now in this moment, in the midst of descent, fallen from heights that may now seem only a dimly remembered dream, falling toward a depth we can only imagine, glimpsed beneath the water’s surface shimmer. And so, says Philip, let us pray that if we are falling from grace, dear God let us also fall with grace, to grace.3
It was twentieth-century French philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil, who twined gravity and grace. She said:
Creation is composed of the descending movement of gravity. . . . Grace is the law of descending movement.4
Was she saying we fall through grace? That there is no gravity without grace? Was she saying all that is must fall?
Oxford says grace is favor. It is goodwill, blessing, and thanksgiving as synchrony. Every fall must surely be through a tunnel of favor, a favor, which is at once, blessing and giving thanks that this fall is so. Do you see the desire and fulfillment in it all? A primordial yearning kissing us and all that is with every weighty fall.
Jenna walked to a waterfall. She said she would swear she could feel water longing, arms outstretched, reaching for its beloved—Earth. She says she had a daydream in school one day when as a young girl a teacher muttered in the background of her wonderment about gravity, she drifted into the weight of it. She said she saw Earth pulling us close—all of us, rain and river and you and me—to say I love you.
Kimberly believes the humananimal longing for embrace is born of the same force as gravity. She says our impulse to hug is Earth’s desire to do the same. Jenna says maybe falling is about entering embrace.
On this planet there is a foundational erotic attraction between all bodies, a pull that calls me, my body, toward others just as the valley attracts the waters. Larger bodies attract smaller ones—the sun attracts the Earth, the Earth the waters. Gravitation, according to Aldo Leopold . . . is the Earth’s tender longing for us. . . . Is it not partly because of this tenderness that we feel comforted lying down on a meadow during hard moments, bedding down our bodies on the Earth?5
The world is made up of bodies—human bodies, animal and plant bodies, bodies of water across Earth and sky, bodies of stone, bodies of molecules, atoms, electrons, and quarks. Bodies big and infinitely small.
Contact between bodies is the stuff of reality. Every time one body touches another, it leaves a trace of itself. What it leaves changes the other body. If this is so, then touch is the birth of relationship.6
Eros is the inner desire for relationship born of contact, birthed of touch. And every single thing in this world longs for more contact. Contact strengthens the bond between them, fortifies the relationship, and makes it more intimate so that each body can “come more fully into its own.”7
Some say that the desire for another is as elemental as the atom itself. And in this tilt toward another is a desire to be more, a desire to transform themselves into molecules that they together create.8 You may be disinclined to think atoms have desire. You may believe that’s taking things too far. But surely you would grant that if it is not a fundamental tenderness in the stuff of reality, it is an always ongoing tendency in things to bond together into new forms, forms that are in every way, more.9
What if falling is the gravity of desire? What if that desire has dibs on you and me?
With thanks to an organization called Boondockers Welcome and generous hosts.
Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green), p. 17.
Philip Simmons, Learning to Fall: Blessings from an Imperfect Life (New York: Bantam, 2003), p. 12.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952). pp.3–4.
Weber, Matter & Desire, pp. 17–18.
Ibid., p. 23.
Ibid., p. 24.
Ibid., “Natalie Knapp, a Berlin-based philosopher, views the world as made up of multilayered bonds, rather than solid, congealed things or victorious solitary survivors. She thinks that atoms feels something like desire for one another, a desire to be more, to transform themselves into collectively constructed, complex molecules. For Knapp, this is an elementary act of love.” pp.18–19.
Ibid.
Desire, falling, grace, gravity, touch, yearning, descent, bonding, connection. I'm intrigued by this conversation Renée. Atoms "desiring" to touch and form bigger molecules. Why not? There is so much we don't know and can never truly know. Why not think that desire to connect is what this unfathomable universe is all about. Isn't that love really? And to imagine that all the forces in the universe are governed ultimately by love and desire. It expands our limited way of seeing everything. The scientists are looking for the theory of everything, and what I've read, is that they think the smallest particle that exists is like a string that continually vibrates; that vibration is a constant in everything that exists. Vibration sounds like energy that "desires" to move and perhaps vibrate with other vibrating particles, molecules, cells, bodies, by touching and bonding. And isn't love a vibrating phenomenon? It stirs the heart and moves through everything; giving itself away and toward everything else. I may have shared this Mark Nepo poem before, but it speaks to me of these things.
"You ask, how much can one heart hold, as I lift a rock worn by the stream to its beauty by holding onto nothing. For all the ways we resist, each soul by the weight of its fundamental being, brings us to the bottom of things where we are worn smooth. I think this abrasion of life force is a form of inner erosion that each person experiences on earth. Finally, it's letting go that lets us rest on the bottom. You ask, and all I can say, is that teachers wait in the center of every moment, to show us that though there are many places to go, they all lead to the same ground of being we all share. In this way, we run through the world, only to be worn to a common center in which we recognize each other at last." To a common center like gravity we all meet there; to the bottom where we all fall, hopefully with grace to grace and immersed in love.
Hi Renee,
When you and others write so passionately about gravity and falling and descent, I can't stop myself from reading for the nth time Joyce's most famous paragraph, the last one of "The Dead."
So here it is for the nth plus one time!
"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."