Restoration is not just an idea—it is something we can feel. It has a sound, a cadence, a rhythm that moves through us and connects us to one another. Gerald L. Deloney’s Gravity: The Story of Our Becoming invites readers to see restoration as more than a concept. It is a practice, a lived experience, and often it begins with rhythm.
When communities have been fractured by empire and supremacy, rhythm has always been the anchor. Songs carried history when words were forbidden. Drums kept connection alive when borders and chains tried to separate people. Even today, rhythm shows up in the way people march for justice, in the clapping hands of worship, in the chants at protests. Rhythm is restoration because it binds us into coherence, reminding us that we are not alone and that our stories still matter.
Deloney describes rhythm not just as music but as pedagogy, a way of teaching and learning. Think about how rhythm helps us remember—the nursery rhyme that stays in your head, the melody that teaches you the alphabet, the chant that keeps a group moving in unison. Rhythm organizes memory. It keeps truth alive even when empire insists on silence. In this way, rhythm becomes more than art; it becomes survival and repair.
Restoration through rhythm is not only cultural; it is personal. Each of us carries rhythms within—the steady beat of the heart, the rise and fall of the breath, the cycles of emotion and rest. Yet modern life, shaped by speed and scarcity, often pulls us out of sync. We rush past our own rhythms, ignoring what our bodies and spirits need. Gravity reminds us to listen. Restoration begins when we pay attention to the rhythms within us and align them with the rhythms of community.
This rhythm of restoration calls for intentional action. It might look like pausing to breathe before reacting, or gathering with others to sing, or reclaiming traditions that empire tried to erase. It might look like walking in step with others in pursuit of justice, or simply remembering that rest itself is a form of refusal against systems that demand constant productivity. Restoration, when seen as rhythm, becomes a way of life—a daily practice of coherence.
The beauty of rhythm is that it never belongs to just one person. A beat becomes powerful when it is shared. One voice can begin a song, but it is the joining of others that makes the song a movement. In the same way, restoration is not something we achieve alone. It is collective, woven through the rhythms we choose to honor together.
Gravity: The Story of Our Becoming shows us that rhythm is not background—it is the very substance of restoration. It reminds us that coherence is possible, not by erasing grief or distortion, but by creating a new cadence that holds them and transforms them. In rhythm, we find the pulse of Becoming, and in Becoming, we step into restoration.
Gravity: The Story of Our Becoming is available now on Barnes & Noble, Google Books, Draft2Digital, Kobo, Lulu, and IngramSpark.