Astrophysical 101:
A Lecture on the Nature of the Attraction between
Two Bodies

     Consider the celestial objects: their dances, their violent collisions.
Note how one body will attract another.  Pulling it.  Dragging it.  Sometimes holding
it for a moment or an aeon.  It's not magic.  It's not fairy dust.
It's an ancient and immutable force of nature.

     Observe how two objects are drawn to each other.  With enough mass and
enough speed and just the right trajectory they will collide.  They MUST collide.
It's likely that one or both will be damaged or destroyed, but they have no choice.

     In other cases, both may be spared because of infinitesimal differences
in their trajectories.  One body may pull the other close but fail to hold it.
The forces at work may become inverted as one object, once pulled relentlessly,
is now hurled away -- its path forever altered.

     Under certain circumstances, however, the body will not be flung away.
One object may remain under the influence of the other.  If that attraction is just right
 -- neither too strong, nor too weak -- a stable orbit will result.
One body now circling another.

     Note that these orbits are elliptical -- not circular -- and sometimes exceedingly so.
At its closest point, the orbiting object may come very near its partner while,
at its farthest, it may seem impossibly distant.  It will return, though, unless influenced
by another body. 

     Finally, consider that on rare occasions two celestial bodies may be so similar
that they affect each other in equal measure.  This is not so much an orbit as
it is a waltz, a delicate dance of binary twins.  Two bodies forever circling,
yet encircled by, each other.

     We are these stars and planets.  These moons, asteroids and comets.
Each of us has our own mass, our own velocity and our own direction.  Love is our gravity
-- a natural law: irrefutable, inescapable, absolute.  Can you feel it?