Our grandmother, whose belly was a star, begat the elements of mother earth, the dust from which all life arose. For four and a half billion years later, gravity has been the same as it was in the beginning, drawing Earth’s children to its center from birth to death. Dust to dust. As Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it in the hit series Cosmos, “Earth pulls on us. Our lives are a relentless struggle with gravity. From our first efforts to stand to our final surrender, we are struggling to overcome the Earth's pull. We are born, live and die in a force field-- one that is almost as old as the universe itself. 13.8 billion years.”
A prison you cannot escape.
Earth pulls on us. Across the world, we kneel, press our foreheads to the ground. We kiss terra firma with gratitude after weeks at sea. Mineral pools bubbling from the planet’s core draw us to their soothing waters, heal our tired bodies. Each night, we upend our centers of gravity, we sleep, momentarily convinced to stop resisting.
But as long as earth pulls on us, we pull on her. Gravity attracts all bodies to one another. When our foreheads bow into the dirt, two global forcefields meet in worship. The forcefield of a human head draws the planet towards itself. We pull on the earth. At 9.81 meters per second squared, earth rises to meet our lips, obeying the unbreakable laws of nature. She dutifully slips her immense hands beneath our tired backs as we snore, each breath taken in relativity to her mass.
We pull on the earth. Digging, weeding, planting trees that defy gravity’s presence. When the forcefields of humans and earth collide, soils turn, roses stretch to the heavens, waves of grain bend in the breeze and then reach again for the sky. Trees bulge with fruit that then falls on the heads of puzzled physicists. A small portion of the sphere becomes our own as we coax up artichokes, hollyhocks, grapes. A garden, a place to co-create and to observe inevitable death.
In The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, a sickly and rejected girl, Mary, is summoned by her uncle, the wealthy Lord Craven of Yorkshire. As her new guardian, who is unable to give her any real attention or time, he asks her:
“Is there anything you want? Do you want toys, books, dolls?”
“Might I,” quavered Mary, “might I have a bit of earth?”
“Earth!” he repeated. “What do you mean?”
“To plant seeds in–to make things grow–to see them come alive,” Mary faltered.
Her uncle instructs her to take what she wishes, from anywhere, and bids her goodbye. Unwittingly, he gifts her the Secret Garden, the heart and soul of the late Mrs. Craven, her mother’s sister. Mary’s aunt was killed by a falling branch in the very same garden, that bit of earth that was her life and death.
With the door locked and the key buried, the secret garden lay dormant, unloved, sickly, forgotten… not unlike poor Mary. But the laws of nature are constant. Life cycles continue from death to rebirth; the garden is tended by Mary, the act of which, in turn, brings her to life.
In the broadway musical, Lord Craven sings,
She should have a pony, gallop 'cross the moor
She should have a doll's house with a hundred rooms per floor
Why can't she ask for a treasure? Something that money can buy
That won't die, when I'd give her the world, she asks instead for some earth
She'll grow to love
The tender roses, lilies fair, the iris tall
And then in fall, her bit of earth
Will freeze and kill them all
Once we accept that change is inevitable, we realize there is no fixed place in the cosmos. All of nature is in motion. Earth pulls on us, we pull on the earth, seasons generate sprouts and fruit, currents of moisture and wind lay ruin to crops, we struggle on tiny feet to stand, we get old, we fall. But we don’t let gravity get us down. We pull on the earth as it hurdles through space.
Even standing still listening to the birds, Tyson reminds us that “Earth is turning at more than 1,600 kilometers per hour while it orbits the Sun at more than 100,000 kilometers per hour. And the Sun is moving through the galaxy at a half a million miles per hour. And the Milky Way is moving through the universe at nearly one and a half million miles an hour” (Neil deGrasse Tyson). As we walk through deserts, drive across swamps, plant beds of onions, the ground is moving.
When stars of a certain mass die and their fuel begins to run out, they become black holes, bending spacetime. Not even light can escape their incredible gravitational pull. It is thought that at the center of most galaxies, supermassive black holes exist, absorbing stars and merging with other black holes.
When our sun is finally sucked in and becomes timeless, spaceless, perhaps it emerges on the other side in a parallel universe. A universe where life doesn’t end, time and space are constant, light doesn’t bend, gravity barely has a grip. We float free, wandering and wondering whether another kind of life exists beyond us. A life where gardens grow and heal humans and the humans revitalize a bit of earth. Where we are the makers of change rather than those who suffer from it. We pull on the earth, and the earth pulls on us. All is well and in balance forever in our secret garden.
