Gravity is serious stuff. Gravity is what keeps the tides rolling in and out, keeps the moon circling the earth, keeps the earth circling the sun, and creates the familiar star-strewn spiral arms of the milky way— and the billions of galaxies like her.

Gravity is also what holds us in orbit around people and circumstances in our lives. Familiarity, pattern, well-worn trenches of routine. We can trudge through our days, head down, allowing the invisible pull of gravity to keep us in the place we’ve created. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing… much of life is reduced to details, after all. I must cook dinner, yet again, tonight. Try as I might to escape it, my children need to be fed. Every day. The laundry must be done. The bills should be paid. Gravity can help us mindlessly navigate those necessary-but-numbing tasks that make up much of our day to day living. But there’s a trap there…

It’s easy to forget to look up. It’s all too easy to let our hearts get set on auto-pilot, and to forget our dreams, in the face of the powerful pull of letting gravity dictate where we place our next step. It’s always easier to let gravity hold us down, and defying gravity takes tremendous energy and force of will.

A spaceship leaving earth for the stars takes force, will, energy and carefully unleashed power to break earth’s gravity. Once that bond is broken, though, the ship is in space, and requires little force to move- and can freely then use the gravity of the earth to induce orbit, or to slingshot towards the moon, or the use the moon’s gravity to shoot back to earth… freewill becomes the factor.

When we forget who we are, and allow gravity to dictate where our next step will fall, we’ve given up our spirits. We’ve resigned ourselves to auto-pilot and simply surviving the remainder of what we have left. We need to remember to look up, to remember choices in our lives are a divine mandate, and we need not hand that over to anyone, or anything.

When we look up and see the star-strewn arms of our distant and close galaxy in the inky night sky, we are looking at ourselves. We are made of the same things as those stars, and gravity can play a powerful and beautiful role in catapulting us towards a life we want, or it can crush us in a black hole. It’s up to us.