Against Gravity

Before the mark, a pause. Pressure gathers, then loosens, leaving a white field.

I’m interested in what arrives when I don’t fill it, how gravity releases its hold and something lighter crosses in. This is the entry point to grace.

Simone Weil wrote:

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”

In between, 2024

Grace, for Weil, isn’t a virtue or reward. It’s an interruption, something that slips in precisely when we stop reaching. Where gravity pulls downward, grace descends freely; where the will clings, grace loosens. It isn’t effort that draws it closer, but the quiet between efforts, the suspension of demand. To touch grace is to witness a reversal of human motion: an un-doing rather than an act.

Yet this motionless arrival is almost impossible to imagine in the present moment. Every part of life urges us to fill, to react, to maintain continuity. The idea of a void sounds dangerous, wasteful, even shameful. But the void Weil describes is not absence, it’s receptivity. It’s the space through which something finer might breathe.

The lost art of emptiness

Our era confuses motion with life. The scroll, the update, the next thing. The imagination, Weil said, “is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.” We patch our cracks with noise, polish our discomfort until it gleams.

Perhaps this is why grace has become almost inaccessible: it demands nothing, while we are trained to demand everything. The modern soul has no entry point left unguarded. To sit without a task is to feel the pressure of irrelevance. To wait without outcome feels like failure.

What we fear most is the moment after the doing ends, the interval where we face ourselves unaccompanied. That space resembles boredom, but beneath it lies raw potential. The fear of the void is, at its root, the fear of meeting what lives beyond control.

The feminine displacement

This fear is often amplified in women, whose lives are framed around containment and performance. Society trains us to occupy every surface beautifully, efficiently, never idly. To maintain homes, emotions, appearances, narratives. To be the thread that holds everything together, never the open window through which something new might enter.

3499, 2023

We are praised for composure, for the illusion of ease under pressure, for polishing what cracks. The archetype of Venus, once radiant in her stillness, has been replaced by an exhausted multitasker: graceful only in how well she hides her depletion.

Domestic care, emotional management, and unending productivity all feed the same law of gravity that Weil warned about, the pull toward control. Grace is its rebellion. But the rebellion cannot be fought; it can only be allowed. It asks us to withdraw from the constant labour of self-definition and become porous again.

When women stop performing perfection, the space that opens is both terrifying and luminous. It exposes the part of the feminine that has always been elemental rather than decorative: the capacity to receive, transform, and reflect. This is not passivity but power through permeability, the kind that water and light know.

The return to Venus

To reclaim grace is to remember the art of being moved instead of moving everything. It begins with small refusals: not answering immediately, not fixing what feels broken, not explaining every silence. It is a discipline of letting the unknown unfold at its own pace.

Undo, 2021

Venus in her original sense was never ornamental. She was the equilibrium of beauty and being, the meeting point between attraction and rest. In a culture of perpetual acceleration, her energy becomes radical. She reminds us that beauty grows in intervals, not increments; that grace appears when control dissolves.

When we speak of feminine energy, it’s often reduced to softness or emotion. But grace is a subtler current: it’s alignment with unseen order, a quiet participation in something larger than will. To live gracefully is not to move perfectly but to move in correspondence, with breath, with time, with the living field around us.

Perhaps grace is the intelligence of the world when we stop interrupting it.

The hope of receptivity

Flight, 2025

There is hope in remembering that we don’t need to manufacture grace. It isn’t scarce; it’s simply unnoticed, displaced by noise. The moment we release control, something rearranges itself toward harmony. The mind softens, the senses widen. We become witnesses rather than engineers of beauty.

Grace is not a reward for goodness but the atmosphere of presence itself. It belongs to the same dimension as love, art, and forgiveness, things that appear only when invited by stillness. The work, then, is not to become more but to become clear.

This clarity is not sterile or detached. It’s alive with attention. It’s what Weil called decreation. the process of unmaking the false self so that what is real can exist. To decreat is to trust that emptiness has meaning, that the unseen is already at work even when we stop.

Coda

There is a moment, just before dawn, when the air feels suspended between night and light. The city hasn’t begun its noise, and even the wind seems undecided. If you stand still enough, you can feel that pause as substance as if the world is breathing in before exhaling the day.

That breath is grace. It arrives without announcement, without worthiness. It requires only that we do not fill it.

— Ugne Pouwell