Another Interlude: Sunlight and People Passing by a Bus Stop

On a recent late winter morning, I found myself standing at my bus stop with time to spare. A sunny day, despite the chill, led me to feel and see the sunlight for what it appears to be. For it originates from our local star some 93 million miles away. That distant star – 93 million miles is so far away that is takes that light nine minutes to reach us – shines so brightly that it brings our daytime existence into fully luminous reality stronger than any light source produced by man or earth-bound nature. That we have this eternal and free source of light seemed freshly amazing to me at that moment. Now, one can argue, quite rightly, that the light of the sun appears bright and sufficient for our purposes because after several hundred million years eyes have evolved in response to what was available. But it also illuminates Mars and even Pluto is a way that allows us – via our cameras – to see what they look like on their surface. I’m just saying….

Under that light, I watched people going by on their own business. And, again, not a novel thought, but I saw each of them as the center of a universe as real as the one I see myself in the center of. All of us self-contained, full blown individual realities rushing past each other.  In the day-to-day crush of people and events in the 21^st Century, the tendency to solipsism may not be just my sin.

Plants and the Sun

There's a fascinating article in the New Yorker on The Intelligent Plant.  It looks at the current debate among plant scientists over whether plants are intelligent or might be said to behave intelligently.  Plants do seem to interact with their environment in a way that appears directed and can often be quite complex.  But what caught my eye was the statement by one scientist to the effect that one does not have to ascribe intelligence to plants just to make them sound special as it's enough simply to note that they "eat sunlight."

We all learn about photosynthesis in school.  How sunlight is converted to free electrons within plant chloroplasts and made available to make carbohydrates from air and soil.  This is indeed wonderful enough.  But the notion that what plants are doing can be simply described as eating sunlight brings to the fore just how miraculous a process this really is.  Plants eat sunlight and we animals can then eat them and those that eat them for us.  Through the intermediation of plants, we too eat sunlight.  And it's free.

On a recent warm, sunny winter solstice day, sitting outside smoking a cigar, I looked anew at how this system works.  The universe is constructed in just such a way as to allow complex physics and chemistry to evolve giant balls of gas that release tremendous fountains of energy -- we call these stars, like our sun -- free to be consumed by stationary processing plants -- that we indeed call plants -- to also feed mobile creatures that may eventually achieve individual consciousness. 

Pretty cool.

Darwin Sunset

The sun was the first god, his power, majesty and light intimating the true god of the big bang. He is a light so bright that he provides our life across 93 million miles of emptiness. He rules the day, giving us colors even after he sets. The moon rules the night, though she demurely veils and unveils herself slowly, showing all only when the sun is in his deepest slumber.

While it is remarkable enough that the sun gives us just enough but not too little or too much, how much more beyond understanding is it that the sun and moon appear to us the exact same size, each ruling in its realm, each at times covering the other to show us even more. But all is in motion. The moon recedes from the mother, born from earth but like every daughter eventually going her way. The sun, burning through crushing matter, will one day reach out and swallow us, leaving all that went before in ashes. But here and now, everything is perfect, for us.