This blog, for the most part, is a compendium of all the different ways I can contrive to tell you about the simple fact of my love for you. Although I don’t think I will run out of ways to tell you this, I thought it might get a little bit boring. Same ol’ me. Same ol’ message.

You asked me recently who or what I thought we were in the iterations of us that came before. As I’ve considered this over the past week or so, I’ve begun to think it might be fun to tell you I love you from the point of view of one of my previous forms.

Of course, given the limits of human knowledge, I’ve had to take a lot of liberty in deciding what form I might have been and what that form might say or have said. I’ve decided that not all forthcoming blog entries will be like this, but some of them will.

This one will be like this. Here, we are both natural philosophers living in the early 1800s. I’m an astronomer and you are a botanist. I am writing you a letter trying to explain to you the underpinnings of my tedious calculations in a way that makes sense to you. You are brilliant in your own right, but while your eyes are fixed on the wonders of the earth, mine are fixed on the stars and beyond. Here goes:

My Fellow Friend,

The moment we raised our eyes to the heavens is the very moment we became, if something less than angels, still something more than animals. Of all living creatures, only humans dare to look up from the earth and dream of other worlds. Those distant worlds are connected to ours by a vast and ubiquitous force. So vast and ubiquitous, in fact, that it went undiscussed and taken for granted throughout most of history.

Yet now we know that the same force which sends a crumb of bread tumbling to the floor keeps the moon tethered in her orbit. I’m talking about gravity, where the attractive force between two bodies is mutual and equivalent, whatever the difference of mass between them.

The ancients imagined the earth was the central point of the universe. Newton’s discovery showed us that this is am incomplete truth. The earth is the center of a web of force that touches the moon, the sun, the other planets, and perhaps even all those distant stars that burn so far away. But every other moon, sun, comet, planet, and star is itself a center, and exerts its own force upon all the rest.

Nothing in the universe stands alone.

With You Always,

C