Gravity + The Erotic
“You don’t exist in time. Time exists in you.”
Four fundamental forces exist in the universe.
There's what I like to call the Paula Abdul Force, or what scientists refer to as electromagnetism, which describes how objects can be both pushed and pulled apart.
There's the strong nuclear force, which describes how things fully merge.
There's also the weak nuclear force, which describes how things fall apart.
And then there's gravity.
It's a force that acts between any two objects with mass or energy, bringing them toward one another. In other words, gravity is a universal appeal we have toward other things. You and me, planets and stars, your desk and the tree sitting outside your window.
We're all in a constant dance of attraction toward everything around us, to varying degrees, at all times.
According to Rob Brezsny, "Magicians of the Western Hermetic tradition say that gravity is actually a form of love—the irresistible attraction that all things have for each other over even the vastest distances."
And Andreas Weber once wrote, "Gravitation...is the Earth's tender longing for us."
This force, though, never pushes, like with electromagnetism.
It never induces a full merging, like with the strong nuclear force.
And it doesn't cause decay, like with the weak nuclear force.
Gravity only pulls.
This, then, is why I consider it the universe's most erotic force.
But what exactly is "the erotic?"
When Esther Perel speaks of the erotic, she means a quality of aliveness or radiance.
When Audre Lorde wrote about the erotic, she called it a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
Mixing it all, then, I might describe the erotic as:
An aliveness in the middle space between all matter.
The more mass something has, the weightier this matter.
The weightier the matter, the stronger its pull.
The stronger the pull, the more attraction we experience.
In fact, do you know what happens when one object has so much mass and so much proximity to something else?
Even light and time will bend around it.
Doesn't this explain why time begins to warp when you're with people or working on something that matters to you? Doesn't it say something about a quality of presence—a quality of aliveness—that you experience when doing something meaningful?
Doesn't it also, then, say something about why your time might feel so fleeting if you're dedicating it to things that don't bring you alive?
If this is a fundamental law of the universe, doesn't it make you wonder...
whether you'd have all the time you'd ever want...if you just gave the things that bring you joy a bit more weight in your world?
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