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.
Thank you for this Ed. I have a foggy brain today and was trying to articulate a comment that meant exactly what you said. I should've read your comment first🤣
Donna, I love that you read and comment on other's comments. 🙏
What also occurs to me as I read you is the collective bubbling up of a train of reflection running between folks here. You point to that in "trying to articulate a comment that meant exactly what you said."
I love where you have taken this . . . into vibrational energy, into what that vibrational energy might be, which you offer as Love, as the desire for love by Love itself. And you tell us that science cannot ever truly know *all*. Mystery prevails. Mystery prevails behind matter. Science, by and large, is knowledge of and an attempt to explain matter and its relationships, even if that matter is an infinitely small vibrating 'string'. String theory stretches materialist notions of reality and at the same time, reaches its own limit . . . because it's vibrating! It's moving and changing and calls up questions about *why* it's vibrating! To which you say "Isn't love a vibrating phenomenon? It stirs the heart and moves through everything; giving itself away and toward everything else." Exquisite. Thank you, Ed.
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."
When I first read your comment, I wondered, has the theme 'falling' and 'emptying' in autumn become too cliché? Surely, it's overdone. Then, I read your "nth plus one time" sharing of Joyce from "The Dead," a work I absolutely love and thank you for bringing into the fold here!
Keeping a soft eye cast upon the goings on of the Natural World never ceases to illuminate deeper truths of our own existence. We also come to recognitions of the sacred passing through the profane.
Thank you for sharing. And congratulations on your new Substack milestone!
Dearest Renée, I have read and re-read your beautiful thought provoking words, as I always do, in order that I have understood fully, or at least as fully as my untrained mind is capable of being neither doctor nor scientist. As I read through the replies, eloquent and informed, I feel there is little I can intelligently add that can highlight further the notion that everywhere, in everything, is desire, to fall into gathering, into grace. I cannot speak to you of molecules or matter, these are entities far from my realm of comprehension but ‘grace’… yes.
You quote Simone Weil, a woman revered in this country for her tireless humanitarian work, a woman, in my work, whose name occurs often, she writes;
“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”
Perhaps grace is a small part of the law of falling? Do the leaves not fall gracefully to fill the earths desire for nourishment? Do the clouds not make their water with grace also?
She also wrote,
“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius”
Thank you for your genius Renée, for turning the cogs (much in need of oiling) of my brain forwards again. X
First, thank you, as always, for reading. Nothing means more than that. That you read again touches me like another layer of icing on the cake.
Second, what you bring always prompts my own reflection and I can only imagine that of others who come to the comments.
You give us more of Simone Weil, much more that is important, especially this: "Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void." And then with your questions, it seems to me, we can see how nature can show us that grace (favor, blessing, goodwill, and thanksgiving toward us) is always there, always filling the empty spaces we're so afraid to know, and so, our minds are "continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace must pass." This does not mean we won't fall. Quite not. And it does not mean that when we fall things will necessarily work out the way we want. And surely, in times such as these, especially the horrors we are bearing witness to and too many are enduring, we have every reason not to believe that grace is here at all. This topic is tough territory in especially trying times. But grace is abiding here on this planet and within and between us.
I'm grateful for what you have added, Susie. And thank you for your kind words about writers awakening us to truth. Back at you!
Dear Renee, warmest wishes from a slightly damp UK! Where is our anchor? We wish to create a new reality and so we detach from all that we are familiar with. The floating sensation brings comfort for a while until we start to bump into obstacles and we richochet into outer space, waving at our fellow humans as they do the same. The pull of gravity back down to earth is the invitation to see things differently, to wander into the heights of the lakes and trespass on the depths of the mountains. Not matter which way up we find ourselves, the reflection of Mother Nature in water reminds us that when we connect back from where we have been we find solid ground, a place to put the (souls) of our feet. With love and light. Louise x
And warmest wishes to you, dear friend, from a sunny, cold day in Ontario, the surround of chimney smoke a delicious olfactory companion to the brisk autumn air. What enchants me about what you share is the upside-down reality you give--"wander into the heights of the lakes and trespass on the depths of the mountains." Even that you call on 'trespass' suggests that we look at perspective from new vantage points, showing us that perspective is simply a way of seeing through the world, and you nudge us to stretch. Thank you.
If desire comes from Source then perhaps desire lives in the space between the atoms? Perhaps every desire is a direction from Source, and when we 'allow' it that energy will take on new forms. When we tilt toward desire we are shifting toward what is best for us yet our culture puts a different slant on the concept of desire. I don't think it's possible to have desire without tapping into something greater than us, that thing we don't fully understand. Even, say, a desire for something that does not serve you is an opportunity for deeper exploration and healing so, in a roundabout way, it is Source trying to get your attention.
I see how your comment weaves seamlessly with what Ed shared about vibration and Love. Here, you are bringing Source into the fold as that vibration, that Love. And here, you offer this: "When we tilt toward desire we are shifting toward what is best for us yet our culture puts a different slant on the concept of desire." Such a radical turn of perspective on desire. And, again, I turn to what Louise shared about perspective.
This: "I don't think it's possible to have desire without tapping into something greater than us, that thing we don't fully understand." I hoped this would come through in the reflection. Desire, Eros: what if we let go of our fear and, as you offer, let this force guide a "deeper exploration and healing"?
Thank you. And for your comment on the images. As the world gets fuller and the panorama gets more filled in, I find myself becoming more intimate with the near visual surroundings more so than the wide expanse.
Deeply grateful for your thoughts and wanderings on this subject. Grace, desire, gravity, the earth calling us into its embrace. I feel this deeply right now. Blessings.
This is gorgeous, Renee! I love the images too. The watery Goddess-ness, rippling with desire. I might have mentioned this on a previous comment, but I see the Self as a collaboration of entities, each with their own consciousness (even subatomic particles have consciousness, right?). And I've often wondered what it is that brings certain entities together to form a Self (when they could've ended up as part of a different Self). I remember studying Empedocles, the father of the system of classical elements (earth, air, water and fire) and learning that in his philosophy, strife is what breaks the elements apart and love is what pulls them together. This teaching really moved me. And now your words add to it. I can see that my atoms love each other, and my cellular organelles desire one another, and don't even get me started on the lovefest that my microbes are having. It IS desire that holds us together as the Self. And it IS desire that propels my Self towards another Self. Thank you so much for bringing clarity to this for me! I think that maybe we are in this realm of perceived separation, the multiplicity in unity, in order to experience relationship. To have an other than Self object to relate with. I guess what I'm coming to understand, as cliche as it sounds, is that love is the reason for it all. ❤️❤️❤️
You've turned my wheels here, re: "what it is that brings entities together to form a Self (when they could have ended up as a different Self)." Life science would say that a self comes into being subsequent to the self-organizing and self-creating (autopoietic) activities that bring a life into being, that the formation of a semipermeable boundary through these activities defines formation of 'self'. And we could certainly say that this is so on the physical plane. But here, we are looking at the plane of 'within' and the inner desire for contact and relationship that is the stuff of reality. So, what if self is the coming together as an organized whole of different entities (as you say)? It stands to reason that Self precedes self. This is what you seem to be saying, and this seems to be what we are coming to here in this inquiry on desire. And there's a direction we could take this to support your supposition. The 17th-century German philosopher and Christian mystic, Jakob Böhme, has given us a cosmological vision to support what you offer. For Böhme, Desire precedes all. It is the first impulse of the Absolute--the Desire to know and be known--which gives way to the formation of existence, first through separation of Self (of the Absolute), then, through an involuting of the anguish of unfulfilled Desire, there is frustration, wrath even, which, according to Böhme, gives way to Light, and just as soon, Love! Love is birthed of the suffering of frustrated Desire. Of course, I have WAY over simplified this! The cosmology goes on to give us the formation of formation itself, but I wanted to share this cosmology with you--in case you do not know Böhme's work, because you have intimated it! And coming to know you as I am . . . this comes as no surprise to me.
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.
Thank you for this Ed. I have a foggy brain today and was trying to articulate a comment that meant exactly what you said. I should've read your comment first🤣
Donna, I love that you read and comment on other's comments. 🙏
What also occurs to me as I read you is the collective bubbling up of a train of reflection running between folks here. You point to that in "trying to articulate a comment that meant exactly what you said."
Dear Ed,
I love where you have taken this . . . into vibrational energy, into what that vibrational energy might be, which you offer as Love, as the desire for love by Love itself. And you tell us that science cannot ever truly know *all*. Mystery prevails. Mystery prevails behind matter. Science, by and large, is knowledge of and an attempt to explain matter and its relationships, even if that matter is an infinitely small vibrating 'string'. String theory stretches materialist notions of reality and at the same time, reaches its own limit . . . because it's vibrating! It's moving and changing and calls up questions about *why* it's vibrating! To which you say "Isn't love a vibrating phenomenon? It stirs the heart and moves through everything; giving itself away and toward everything else." Exquisite. Thank you, Ed.
With love,
Renée
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."
David,
When I first read your comment, I wondered, has the theme 'falling' and 'emptying' in autumn become too cliché? Surely, it's overdone. Then, I read your "nth plus one time" sharing of Joyce from "The Dead," a work I absolutely love and thank you for bringing into the fold here!
Keeping a soft eye cast upon the goings on of the Natural World never ceases to illuminate deeper truths of our own existence. We also come to recognitions of the sacred passing through the profane.
Thank you for sharing. And congratulations on your new Substack milestone!
With love,
Renée
Thanks Renee!
Whether leaves or snow, there's something special about gentle things falling together.
David, I could not agree more.
Dearest Renée, I have read and re-read your beautiful thought provoking words, as I always do, in order that I have understood fully, or at least as fully as my untrained mind is capable of being neither doctor nor scientist. As I read through the replies, eloquent and informed, I feel there is little I can intelligently add that can highlight further the notion that everywhere, in everything, is desire, to fall into gathering, into grace. I cannot speak to you of molecules or matter, these are entities far from my realm of comprehension but ‘grace’… yes.
You quote Simone Weil, a woman revered in this country for her tireless humanitarian work, a woman, in my work, whose name occurs often, she writes;
“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”
Perhaps grace is a small part of the law of falling? Do the leaves not fall gracefully to fill the earths desire for nourishment? Do the clouds not make their water with grace also?
She also wrote,
“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius”
Thank you for your genius Renée, for turning the cogs (much in need of oiling) of my brain forwards again. X
Susie,
First, thank you, as always, for reading. Nothing means more than that. That you read again touches me like another layer of icing on the cake.
Second, what you bring always prompts my own reflection and I can only imagine that of others who come to the comments.
You give us more of Simone Weil, much more that is important, especially this: "Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void." And then with your questions, it seems to me, we can see how nature can show us that grace (favor, blessing, goodwill, and thanksgiving toward us) is always there, always filling the empty spaces we're so afraid to know, and so, our minds are "continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace must pass." This does not mean we won't fall. Quite not. And it does not mean that when we fall things will necessarily work out the way we want. And surely, in times such as these, especially the horrors we are bearing witness to and too many are enduring, we have every reason not to believe that grace is here at all. This topic is tough territory in especially trying times. But grace is abiding here on this planet and within and between us.
I'm grateful for what you have added, Susie. And thank you for your kind words about writers awakening us to truth. Back at you!
With love,
Renée
Dear Renee, warmest wishes from a slightly damp UK! Where is our anchor? We wish to create a new reality and so we detach from all that we are familiar with. The floating sensation brings comfort for a while until we start to bump into obstacles and we richochet into outer space, waving at our fellow humans as they do the same. The pull of gravity back down to earth is the invitation to see things differently, to wander into the heights of the lakes and trespass on the depths of the mountains. Not matter which way up we find ourselves, the reflection of Mother Nature in water reminds us that when we connect back from where we have been we find solid ground, a place to put the (souls) of our feet. With love and light. Louise x
Dear Louise,
And warmest wishes to you, dear friend, from a sunny, cold day in Ontario, the surround of chimney smoke a delicious olfactory companion to the brisk autumn air. What enchants me about what you share is the upside-down reality you give--"wander into the heights of the lakes and trespass on the depths of the mountains." Even that you call on 'trespass' suggests that we look at perspective from new vantage points, showing us that perspective is simply a way of seeing through the world, and you nudge us to stretch. Thank you.
With love,
Renée
Yes, a delicious stretch! x
If desire comes from Source then perhaps desire lives in the space between the atoms? Perhaps every desire is a direction from Source, and when we 'allow' it that energy will take on new forms. When we tilt toward desire we are shifting toward what is best for us yet our culture puts a different slant on the concept of desire. I don't think it's possible to have desire without tapping into something greater than us, that thing we don't fully understand. Even, say, a desire for something that does not serve you is an opportunity for deeper exploration and healing so, in a roundabout way, it is Source trying to get your attention.
Thank you for sharing this amazing images Renee!
Donna,
I see how your comment weaves seamlessly with what Ed shared about vibration and Love. Here, you are bringing Source into the fold as that vibration, that Love. And here, you offer this: "When we tilt toward desire we are shifting toward what is best for us yet our culture puts a different slant on the concept of desire." Such a radical turn of perspective on desire. And, again, I turn to what Louise shared about perspective.
This: "I don't think it's possible to have desire without tapping into something greater than us, that thing we don't fully understand." I hoped this would come through in the reflection. Desire, Eros: what if we let go of our fear and, as you offer, let this force guide a "deeper exploration and healing"?
Thank you. And for your comment on the images. As the world gets fuller and the panorama gets more filled in, I find myself becoming more intimate with the near visual surroundings more so than the wide expanse.
With love,
Renée
Deeply grateful for your thoughts and wanderings on this subject. Grace, desire, gravity, the earth calling us into its embrace. I feel this deeply right now. Blessings.
Erma,
So good to hear from you. Thank you for sharing this.
I can sense how this would speak to you. . . .
With love, dear friend,
Renée
This is gorgeous, Renee! I love the images too. The watery Goddess-ness, rippling with desire. I might have mentioned this on a previous comment, but I see the Self as a collaboration of entities, each with their own consciousness (even subatomic particles have consciousness, right?). And I've often wondered what it is that brings certain entities together to form a Self (when they could've ended up as part of a different Self). I remember studying Empedocles, the father of the system of classical elements (earth, air, water and fire) and learning that in his philosophy, strife is what breaks the elements apart and love is what pulls them together. This teaching really moved me. And now your words add to it. I can see that my atoms love each other, and my cellular organelles desire one another, and don't even get me started on the lovefest that my microbes are having. It IS desire that holds us together as the Self. And it IS desire that propels my Self towards another Self. Thank you so much for bringing clarity to this for me! I think that maybe we are in this realm of perceived separation, the multiplicity in unity, in order to experience relationship. To have an other than Self object to relate with. I guess what I'm coming to understand, as cliche as it sounds, is that love is the reason for it all. ❤️❤️❤️
Jenna,
You've turned my wheels here, re: "what it is that brings entities together to form a Self (when they could have ended up as a different Self)." Life science would say that a self comes into being subsequent to the self-organizing and self-creating (autopoietic) activities that bring a life into being, that the formation of a semipermeable boundary through these activities defines formation of 'self'. And we could certainly say that this is so on the physical plane. But here, we are looking at the plane of 'within' and the inner desire for contact and relationship that is the stuff of reality. So, what if self is the coming together as an organized whole of different entities (as you say)? It stands to reason that Self precedes self. This is what you seem to be saying, and this seems to be what we are coming to here in this inquiry on desire. And there's a direction we could take this to support your supposition. The 17th-century German philosopher and Christian mystic, Jakob Böhme, has given us a cosmological vision to support what you offer. For Böhme, Desire precedes all. It is the first impulse of the Absolute--the Desire to know and be known--which gives way to the formation of existence, first through separation of Self (of the Absolute), then, through an involuting of the anguish of unfulfilled Desire, there is frustration, wrath even, which, according to Böhme, gives way to Light, and just as soon, Love! Love is birthed of the suffering of frustrated Desire. Of course, I have WAY over simplified this! The cosmology goes on to give us the formation of formation itself, but I wanted to share this cosmology with you--in case you do not know Böhme's work, because you have intimated it! And coming to know you as I am . . . this comes as no surprise to me.
With love,
Renée