Starborne: The Journal of Autocosmology, Issue 1, can be read in full at the above link. Each individual contribution will be shared here as well, one every week.
Marbles in Cabo
By Monica DeRaspe-Bolles
Amid the incidental sounds of a live musical trio, a chattering crowd, and a table strewn with skewbald words, wine, drink, and aperitif, my daughter Delaney spoke a sentence that landed with unexpected weight.
“Well, that’s as certain as gravity,” she said.
Her statement was familiar, almost beyond doubt, yet it struck off-center, unsettling something in me I hadn’t yet named.
“Gravity might not be as certain as we think,” I said more to myself than to her.
Delaney was seated across from me. There were twelve of us—my family and my brother’s—settling into an ocean-side Thanksgiving feast at the Pueblo Bonito Rose in Cabo San Lucas. Perhaps Delaney acknowledged my comment with an impassive glance. If she did, I wasn’t expecting it and didn’t notice. More likely, she remained in semi-private conversation with her new fiancé, Holden; they were probably arranging for more cocktails.
The evening might have unfolded differently—my deep interest in the nature of time might never have surfaced—if not for one person at the table who was shocked by my words: my brand-new son-in-law, Garrett.
“That’s complete and total bullshit, Monica. May I remind you—it’s the law of gravity?” he said, eyes wide, chin thrust forward as far as his neck would allow.
“Actually, Garrett,” I began, “I do have reasons to say this. We know now the universe is evolving. Laws may not be laws at all, but strong habits that develop and evolve, and…”
I managed a sentence—maybe a bit more—before he cut me off.
“Is this the kind of crap you are learning at that school?” he said, the left corner of his mouth quirking upward.
I stared at the space between us, stunned at how fitting it was that this bold, intelligent, exceedingly well-raised, and even amiable young man was now the husband of my daughter, Charlotte. The two of them were so well-matched, so deserving of one another, that it, well… baffled me.
“And why the fuck do you think we even care, Mom?” Charlotte asked.
It was the way she said it.
The eyes of the waiter across from me darted from the brim of his tilted pitcher to me, to my eyes, then back again, as he competently negotiated his pour. He was accustomed to this kind of thing—if not generally, then at least from my family. After almost a week there, this wasn’t the first show we had given him.
Still, I wished the word “Mom” hadn’t been part of her outburst. It always felt worse—harsh words aimed at a mother, witnessed by fathers, by mothers, by a whole host of strangers, especially on Thanksgiving. Judgment hung thick in the air around her, and that was never what I wanted for her. But there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it—not really. Silence or retreat at the first hint of conflict only ever upped the ante.
Wide-eyed, perhaps to signal surprise at Charlotte’s sharpness, Garrett’s otherwise deadpan face came alive as he doubled down.
“Gravity is a law,” he proclaimed.
I looked at my brother, Michael. He was looking at his two youngest boys, who were watching me, wondering, I supposed, what might happen next.
I thought of the plaque in his entryway—General Douglas MacArthur’s poem Build Me a Son, O Lord—hanging proudly for years before his three sons, Simon, Joseph, and Luke, even existed. Michael’s long-standing commitment to ensuring his boys did not grow up “disrespectful and entitled” was forged during the dozen or so years he and his wife, Ann, witnessed firsthand—and then judged—the complex, passionate, intelligent, and developing creatures that are my daughters. To be sure, on occasion, these girls of mine were positively frightful.
With my daughters in mind, Michael would assemble his growing boys in that entryway, each in turn, and then the whole lot of them, and read aloud every word of that plaque. He did this regularly, more often if warranted, and sometimes just for fun—or on special occasions, like when I visited, which is how I learned of his strategy and his aspirations. He was determined not to make the same mistakes my husband and I had made, and he expressed this kindly, too often, and, I thought, with ludicrous naïveté.
“There is more to gravity than Newton’s law, Garrett,” I said.
He lowered his head like a bison holding its ground. “I know what gravity is. It’s 9.8 meters per second squared,” he said. “Exactly the speed I fall when I jump out of a C-140 transport. Anyone who says otherwise is just plain wrong.”
“Monica, it really is a law,” Holden affirmed, his head bobbing with the kind of assurance meant to soothe a child.
Well, isn’t that nice of him, I thought, resisting the impulse to stick out my tongue.
Delaney, who never misses a trick, shot him a sideways what-the-hell-are-you-doing glance.
“Seriously?” she asked.
“Come on, Delaney,” he said under his breath. “She doesn’t even know what she’s talking about!”
Delaney turned to me. “Mom, why do you care?”
It was a reprimand.
“All I said is that gravity may be a habit, and now—only now, after my words are called bullshit—I want to explain why I said it.” My words hovered in front of me, a foot off the table.
She wasn’t convinced; worse, she wasn’t interested. She understood the futility of my effort—there was rarely a harmonious or charitable listening to me at our table. I could see her point.
“But they won’t let me,” I added, ready to let it go.
Daniel, my youngest, noticed the sting of my being shut down. He reached across the table and pressed his hand gently against mine for just a moment. I shook my head, troubled that he should feel burdened by something that wasn’t his fault or responsibility.
More than ten years younger than his sisters, Daniel had been the kind of kid who’d come home from the elementary school bus each day, jump backward onto the kitchen counter, legs dangling, and ask, “How was your day, Mom?” With nineteen years of experience, Daniel knew to expect far more wild, condensed intensity whenever his sisters were around—and quite possibly me as well. He once said that watching our family interact was like embarking on a wildlife safari meticulously staged just for him—or like watching a nature film, years in the making, condensed into an hour. Dull moments were rare in our house; other families, he thought, were far more civilized—and far more boring.
Watching him engage the waiters with quiet consideration, I knew he was thinking about their experience—not just with our family but with the endless flow of vacationers chasing curated moments in places long void of authenticity, all the while calling themselves “Americans.”
“No, you guys. You know what?” I said quietly. “I’m finding it very hard to just drop this. There’s something really wrong with calling my words bullshit and then not allowing me to talk.”
“You really should let her explain, Garrett, if you’re going to call it bullshit,” my husband, David, finally said, without equivocation. “If you level that kind of criticism, you have to allow a response.”
“Oh my God,” Charlotte groaned, muttering under her breath. Everyone else looked silently at me.
“I’ll start by explaining Einstein’s gravity,” I said.
I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to explain gravity as a habit—or that I even could. I’d heard of the principle of precedence: that matter, when probed, tends to provide the same answers it has given before. In other words, matter tends to follow precedence—to develop habits.
I’d been thinking that premises are assumptions—no more certain than beliefs—and that the very idea of fixed, external laws acting on the stuff of the world might be at the root of humans behaving in righteous, confrontational, and even ecologically destructive ways. Maybe what was needed was an understanding of matter in process, an open future, and some goddamned harmony. But I didn’t know how to say any of that—not yet.
I knew I could explain Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. But I also knew it wouldn’t really advance my point—Einstein still believed gravity was a law. Maybe, I thought, if I explained relativity convincingly, it would open a path to something deeper. Or at least they’d see that my understanding of gravity wasn’t as simplistic as they assumed.
Maybe that would—what? Impress them?
This is my opening, I thought.
I jumped up from the table. “Does anyone have a bathing suit in their bag?” I asked. “We need something stretchy—for the fabric of spacetime. And a big bowl. Something to stretch the fabric over. And some marbles.”
David’s hand rested on his forehead. He looked up, a trace of a smile playing at his lips as his palm nudged his eyebrows upward. “What are you doing?”
“Demonstrating gravity,” I said.
I knelt and scanned the sand for anything smooth and round.
The silence that had been my opening began to hum with fistfuls of words tangled in voices and faces. Not good, kind words, but mocking ones. They were laughing—the kind of laughter that ridicules and derides.
I thought surely the noises they are making aren’t governed by laws of acoustics. Surely in this unfolding moment, there is still space for something new to arise—emergent, unruled, born only of what is already in motion.
“Oh my God! She’s lost her marbles!” Holden exclaimed. He thought himself so clever that he said it again and again: “Look! Look! She’s lost her marbles!” He was absolutely delighted with himself—and well he should have been. He garnered quite a laugh from everyone, including David. Even the waiters looked on with amusement.
Michael stood up from the table. “I don’t know what’s wrong with any of you,” he said, his voice trembling. “She brings you here, and this is how you treat her? I can’t sit here another minute.” And he left.
I hesitated, then followed. Once at a safe distance, I turned back. An assembly of waiters stood fixed-eyed, meals in hand, afloat in a cacophonous whirlpool: skewed notes and counter-notes; frenetic beats; Daniel posturing aggressively; David reaching, touching, calming. Daniel was about to storm off. Knowing he’d come in search of me, I retreated into the darkness down the coast.
I stood on the shore of the ocean, warm waves lapping at my sandaled feet, feeling the movement around me and within—the night sky, my pulsing world, the universe awakening. I felt like Kate Winslet on the bow of the Titanic, arms outstretched, flaring forth into a future that pressed in.
What truly mattered was the love I felt for my family—my longing for closeness, connection, and understanding. I wanted only to share with them, to feel them open to me. What were we waiting for? What was humanity waiting for? What could make this possible?
I had said that gravity was a habit—that the laws of the universe were not fixed but evolving. My sense was that matter governs itself from within, and that always and everywhere, something unprecedented is underway. What we needed, I felt, were new convictions: a feel for the irreversibility of time, a sense of the future manifesting, and the quiet knowing that how we treat one another matters—because thought and gesture, word and deed, create the world.
I spoke those words—that gravity might not be a law—almost without precedence. I couldn’t defend the claim, not really. The insight had surfaced as a recognition—something felt before it was understood, arriving not through argument but through attention. Still, I was steeped in a metaphysics of being—one that privileges space and rationality over time and experience, that imagines fixed and eternal laws acting upon inert matter.
In my family, knowledge was about fidelity—holding to what was known, what was trusted, what had worked before. The plaque by Michael’s door said it plainly enough: virtue was something to be instilled, not discovered. David, too, believed in fixed truths—scientific, scriptural, moral. The world made sense when you honored the order of things. But this insight I’d stumbled into resisted closure.
It felt more like a doorway—unstable, alive, pulling me forward.
If I was right, I thought, then my insight had arisen in a universe that lays down habits—regularities of motion, of force, of form—yes, and also structures of thought and experience that shape and constrain how we understand ourselves, one another, and our world. These habits do not preclude change; they cradle it. They hold steady not to resist novelty but to make it possible.
Precedence is not the opposite of the unprecedented—it is its condition.
In that vast, chaotic moment, I resolved to find precedence for the insights that were surfacing in me, to find my lineage in the work of philosophers and scientists who came before me. I resolved to explore the metaphysics of time and becoming, to learn all I could about gravity and so much more—not merely to know, but to live that understanding, to embody it, to give it voice.
All that holds steady—the habits of substance and existence from the birth of the universe to this present moment of tension and strife—was holding steady in me. I carried a vast column of time within me—yet more than that, I was the evolving process, the still-awakening cosmos, universing in ways it never had before. I could learn. I could change. I could bring forth better ways of being in relationship—ways to foster harmony not just within my family, but across all of humankind.
“How’s your night going, Mom?” said Daniel, sprinting up behind me and leaping onto my shoulders.
I laughed and said, “Not too bad. How about you?”
“How about I push you in the water?” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “And then can we gather everyone up in a pile again?”
“Okay,” he said.
Monica DeRaspe-Bolles is a doctoral student at the California Institute of Integral Studies, researching time-developmental cosmology and the emergence of a new structure of human experience that fosters cosmogenetic awakening. She collaborated with Brian Thomas Swimme on the creation of the thirty-five-part mini-film series, “Story of the Noosphere,” and co-authored its companion book, The Story of the Noosphere. Monica lives at Blueberry Front in Snohomish, Washington, a research center for time-developmental experience.
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