Nutation.
Rocking, swaying, or nodding motion in the axis of rotation of an object, such as a planet or bullet in flight.
We tend to believe that wisdom and inner gravity are destinations. Fixed points on the horizon where we someday arrive and settle into permanent knowing. We chase this stillness like a horizon.
But the earth doesn’t rotate with the rigid precision of a machine. It nods. It wobbles. It nutates. That slight, periodic oscillation isn’t a defect. It serves as evidence the planet isn’t spinning alone in a vacuum. Rather, it’s held in a rough push and pull, a gravitational dance with sun and the moon.
To live in a state of nutation, to remember your power only to forget it, to feel your worth dissolve into the morning fog of the mundane isn’t failure. It’s part of orbit.
The forgetting, the losses, the downward parts are what we dread. We read them as erosions, slipping away, tiny deaths. We grasp, and mistake grasping for preservation. We perform, and in performing we seal ourselves off from the very knowing we are trying to protect.
But what if forgetting isn’t loss? What if it’s the scoured ground where a more delicate self now has room to emerge?
Wings regrow feathers and the strange curves of flight return. And with each return comes remembering. Remembering is shy and quiet at first. In time, it becomes a more expansive aspect of yourself, returned from somewhere you cannot name.
Notice that you never return to the same place you left. You come back with a wider aperture. Your nervous system can’t help but bring dust from the void in its pockets.
This is what confers depth. It holds the seeds of knowing. You need not find stillness to be stable. The wobble, this beautiful, rhythmic nutation of the soul, is not the obstruction to your gravity. It is the gravity.
Nutation.
(n. rocking, swaying, or nodding motion in the axis of rotation of an object.)
Darkness’ spine
doesn’t stand
rigid as a nail.
It nods.
A periodic dipping
of the skull
against rotation.
Gravity catches hands
and feet splayed
in the drift of an arc.
Memory thins
unmoored,
spinning in the muck of each day.
This is how all things remember knowing:
fog must burn,
the branch’s wrists must bend under snow,
stone must crack.
The universe somehow finds itself
in rupture.
Nutation. (n., from Latin “nutare,” to nod)
In the Roman world, a nutus was a declaration. It was the nod as a signal from a commander or a god, signaling the turning of fate.
By the time the word reached English, to “nutate” simply meant to nod off—the drowsy, unconscious dipping of the head in surrender to sleep.
Then, in 1728, the astronomer James Bradley looked at the heavens and saw the Earth doing the same. He realized our planet’s axis doesn’t hold a rigid line. It wobbles, dips, and nods. Bradley borrowed the word to describe this celestial rhythm. In doing so, he folded the two meanings back together: the drowsy surrender of the human body and the inevitable, gravitational command of a planet.
P.S. - This entry was inspired by reading Swonam Kieran Roul’s recent piece “If You’re Still Here.”
I found this piece deeply thoughtful in the way it builds 'nutation' into both a physical and inner principle. The movement between astronomy and lived experience is handled with such sensitivity. I especially loved how you let the concept remain an ongoing oscillation rather than rushing to fix it into a rigid metaphor.
The section on forgetting and return felt particularly resonant; there is something so careful in how you frame forgetting not as loss, but as a rhythm that makes a deeper remembering possible. Your attention to scale is also wonderful, moving from planetary motion to internal shifts without flattening either.
The closing poem carries that same motion, holding rupture and continuity together without forcing a resolution. Thank you so much for the generous mention of my work, and for engaging with these ideas in such a considered way.
I learned so much from this post. Thank you! Another fabulous word!