From the Archives

Falling and the Gravity of Desire

Dear Friends and Family,

Today’s letter comes to you from the Archives. Since I am on retreat with some of you, it seemed fitting that this letter should come in part from you whose reflections inspired it, namely,

Ed Entmacher

,

Jenna Newell Hiott

, and

Kimberly Warner - Unfixed

.

I have never sent a letter from the Archives before. I was in Ontario when I wrote these words in response to yours. I was still on pilgrimage. It was the year before this year. It was one letter in a series of letters on falling like leaves into another way, and it grew out of your response to that series.

With love,

Renée

Falling and the Gravity of Desire

a moment of mesmery

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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. The horizon disappears into a misty blur. It was the same yesterday.

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. It too, must surely be touched through the back and forth ripples of light.

Watch it draw close to itself up there. See clouds stroke blue with white then grey and greyer still until something inside says fall. It says let my longing for Earth feel Earth longing for me, the weight and touch of me.¹

Untold numbers of tiny little lives—microbes we call them—have a role to play in rain fall. 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.

walking paths near Thunder Bay marina gave new meaning to watercolor

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.²

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.³

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.

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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?⁴

tender touch of trees

The world is made 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.⁵

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.”⁶

it struck me as an erotic attraction the way every tree and leaf and cloud reached toward the the other in the water

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.⁷ 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.⁸

What if falling is the gravity of desire? What if that desire has dibs on you and me?

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Giving Tuesday has come and gone, but I still love a good cuppa. . .

1. Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green), p. 17.

2. Philip Simmons, Learning to Fall: Blessings from an Imperfect Life (New York: Bantam, 2003), p. 12.

3. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952). pp.3–4.

4. Weber, Matter & Desire, pp. 17–18.

5. Ibid., p. 23.

6. Ibid., p. 24.

7. 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.

8. Ibid.