Expanding universe, attracting heart
A paradox of echoing forces
I’m no astronomer. I don’t really understand the expansion of the universe. In discovering the law of gravity, Newton uncovered the fact that all objects in the universe are attractive, each pulling at and towards each other. For the universe to be ever-expanding, then, seems quite a paradox.
What, then, is it expanding into? Well, as it turns out… nothing. The universe is infinite, we think, but expansion does not equal growth. The a posteriori nature of the universe means that we cannot determine whether it is looping in a closed time system as suggested by Gödel’s rotational model, or whether perhaps it circles back upon itself and all journeys to its “edge” are thereby inherent returns to its starting point. The constant expansion that astronomers speak of is actually an increasing distance between the relative parts of the universe… still a paradox, though, if everything is supposed to be attractive. Astronomers call this initial burst of expansion “cosmic inflation”—an echo of our contemporary earthly economic anxieties that seems both fitting and strange.
Like the paradox of an expanding universe full of attracting bodies, we too live in tension. Expanding ever outward from our origins—our childhood homes, our first loves, our earliest beliefs—we never quite break free of their gravitational pull. These early anchors tug at us even as our journeys diverge away—the roots pulling always at our branches. Perhaps this is why nostalgia grows stronger with distance, why certain relationships come to us anew and yet feel decades or eons old, why definitive memories tug at our narratives even as we rewrite them. Like planets in our own solar systems, we constantly move outward while held in orbit by the very things we're moving from.
In everything are echoes. We cross-name animals where similarities show themselves. The high-pitched, mouse-like bird call comes from a Tufted Titmouse. The barbels, so much like whiskers, protruding from a common bottom-feeding fish drove us to name it the catfish. We humans mirror each other’s emotions with our facial expressions and posture. The branching patterns found in trees mirror the structure of human bronchial tubes, river deltas, and even neural networks in our brains. The spiral shape found in galaxies repeats in nautilus shells, hurricanes, and the unfurling of fern fronds. Cell division and multiplication mirrors how communities grow and separate into new neighborhoods or perhaps how ideas spread and, after time, branch out into new concepts. Like trees and river deltas and networks all over again. Dividing, multiplying, and then echoing all over again. The rhythms beat and the beat echoes in music, poetry, in cycles of day and night…in our hearts too.
What happens on any one level of life, somehow is echoing in all of the others. Thus, I too am expanding. Not physically, but certainly relatively. I expand away from my childhood. I expand away from old friends and old beliefs. I move partly because of inertia—like the universe, I move because I’ve always been moving. I also move because of the impelling force of my own inner dark matter. And always, I move back to the beginning. Or try to.
To expand is to unfold, like an indigo blue bunting opening its wings before flight.
To expand is to open your horizons. To learn, yes, but even more than that to open the hold on your being to learning…to be willing to question everything you know, including your very self.
To expand is to express more fully. To go from a thesis statement to a draft to an essay where more is explained and thoughts are developed more fully, more expansively.
Are these things we are always doing? Or just hope to be doing? Are we expanding? Can we not be?
With the holidays just around the corner, my mind has returned to beginnings…or earlier times. Times when Christmas held a certain magic for me, the magic that only a child can enjoy and spread. When and how it is lost, I have never understood. I tried to hold onto it for so long—going through all of the same processes in dire desperation. Making the same gingerbread houses. Listening to CDs of Christmas songs. Decorating the tree with ornaments our family has acquired since before I was born—glass ornaments with my name and my brothers’ names etched upon them, needlepoint ornaments sewn by my mother, funny little skiing bears and pirouetting clay cookie girls…everything is there…all of the memories. But I have expanded away from the magic.
As I resisted expansion, I used to, out of habit (or perhaps inertia, hope, nostalgia?) watch all of the holiday specials that air each year on TV. My favorite was How The Grinch Stole Christmas. After he steals all of the presents (and well, everything) from Whoville, after he plants himself high up on his mountain to watch their sad, crying faces react to the discovery that they now have no presents, no Christmas, what the Grinch actually sees is that Christmas is something else to the Whos. Out they come, singing, making a circle, holding hands…and celebrating life itself it seems. And it is this realization for the Grinch, the realization that they need nothing else but each other, that causes the Grinch’s heart to grow three sizes that day.
So it is with less, that his heart grows more. Less concrete, more intangible, more comprehension of what was never before known—including the beauty of his own powerlessness. It is in understanding (and humility) that his expansion occurs.
Unlike the physical expansion of suburbs sprawling outward or SUVs growing larger, the Grinch's heart expands inward, growing not merely in size but in capacity. Indeed, his heart expands through reduction—by needing less, his heart grows more. This deepening of what already exists is what a telescope offers, where the vastness of space does not grow larger because the telescope itself expands exponentially but because its distance is brought closer, close enough to make the invisible visible. What happens at the end of The Grinch after this heart expanding moment? He literally lets go of the sled packed with all of the presents from Whoville almost letting it fall off the mountainside, metaphorically suggesting that when we let go of what we thought we needed is exactly when we might find what we genuinely require.
Expansion is not always a positive. Suburbs can over-expand. So can waistlines and McMansions and SUV sizes. Classroom size can expand so much that even the best teachers can’t teach as well as they’d like, being unable to give appropriate attention to each student. Wars can expand. Drought can expand. Pain and grief can expand, for years and years, instead of contracting.
Love also can expand. I have nothing earth-shattering to say or suggest or question today. But I think that as the universe expands, and at an ever-accelerating rates, so should our hearts. As everything quickens and life seems to move ever faster and ever away, and all sometimes seems at increasing distances, so should we press our hearts to match the distance opened. In relationships, if love is not expanding, there is no growth. But remember, expansion comes, in part, out of dark forces and matter. It is not easy and it might be painful. We must be compelled to make our love expand; it will not do so by itself.
Our bodies, like the universe, are finite, but this love is not. While our inclinations and our fantasies and even our failings continue to expand, maybe our hearts can pull everything back, hold everything together. Like gravity itself, they create a force that draws experiences, memories, and connections closer rather than letting them drift endlessly apart. When everything else pushes outward—when time drives us forward, when distances grow between us and those we once knew intimately, when memories threaten to fade into space—it is our hearts that perform this cosmic work of contraction. They create their own kind of gravity, drawing meaning from expansion, finding connection in distance, and sometimes, like the Grinch, discovering that the very act of letting go can pull us closer to what matters most. So, go ahead, expand to your outer edges and back into your core. Discover other realms and, maybe, expand into the release of magic.
With love ever-expanding,
Katie