April 30th, 2008
The Pendulum Heart
The equation on the heart gives the period of a pendulum based on the length of its chain, acceleration due to gravity, and pi, the ratio of a circle to its diameter. All are constant.
Do you experience love as always coming back to a center? Do you sway and return, or might you fly away forever any time you swing?
Transcriptorial: You say I sway, but even that / is made of what stays constant.
[...] Secret Vespers The equation on the heart gives the period of a pendulum based on the length of its chain, [...]
i don’t think you can ever fly away from love. if you ever truely loved someone, you could never stop. love isn’t something that i based on a feeling, it’s something deeper then that. love is a bond, that goes beyond human awareness, so even when you think you hate someone, someday when they’re gone you may realize that you really did love them.
Some people have a hard time dealing with the good things in their lives. They don’t know how to react.
I’ve had similar thoughts, and without having certain knowledge I sway between belief and skepticism. If there were a mathematic equation to figure out the way I love, then I speculate I could change some of the factors, isolate and decode all the “unknowns,” and work towards the solution I wanted. When this doesn’t happen, I sway back towards skepticism, regarding love as an enigma which can’t be unlocked with any amount of obsession
I read a book once, it was called “Men from Mars, Women from Venus.”, by John Gray. It was an interesting book, that prevented some very, very annoying things from happening to me due to misunderstandings and whatnot, and generally made me into a far more patient man.
There was a chapter there, explaining how “Affection develops over time”, if you will. A woman’s affection was indeed expressed in a sine wave, the same function that describes the pendulum’s location. It has its high points and low points, it said.
I can’t say this is true or not because I am not that keen of observation, but what was told of the male side is quite true. A Saw wave, or tooth wave, or whatever you call it. It looks like an asymmetrical zigzag that decreases gradually then snaps back up. Perhaps it is the power of suggestion, but I have indeed observed myself to act somewhat similarly to that.
I know this comment is about ‘affection’ and not ‘love’, but the Pendulum reminded me of that little piece of knowledge and I felt like sharing.
This one’s mine !!
I love it Patrick, it’s perfect !!
People do change so much and often come right back to where they started but the difference is they have the knowledge of the other end of the swing.
How did I ever miss this! I was wandering around in the archives and found it.
This is similar to a discipline I practice to lead into contemplation. I light a candle and focus on the candle itself, then the flame, then the wick. The candle is stolid and unadventurous; you put it somewhere, and there it stays. But without it, there is no flame. The flame gutters in every passing breeze of movement, but always returns to its fixed centre. That centre is the wick; grounded in the candle, it allows the flame to sway, flicker, and return to giving it fixed attention.
None of these three elements is complete without the others. When my attention wanders, like the flame, I return to centre. When my body becomes “heavy”, distracting my attention, I allow the flame to draw energy from that source. And my mind must be steadily intent, like the wick, that never leaves the wax but allows the flame to leap.