A few things I love about the sun
Yellow, sex, mystery
•One thing I love about the sun is that we mustn’t look at it.
•Another thing I love about the sun is that it has been a mystery to our species for most of the time we’ve been a species. Just now, reading William Blake, I read his description of the sun as “a disk of fire.“
What was the fire fueled by?
Once upon a time, modern men looked at the sun and wondered, “how does it do that? How does it burn and burn like it does?” They ran the calculations for a sun that burnt wood. They ran them for coal. No and no. No fuel source they imagined could make the math work out. They published articles. In one, which ran in Scientific American in 1863, they wrote,
“If the sun were composed of coal, it would last at the present rate only 5,000 years. The sun, in all probability, is not a burning, but an incandescent, body. Its light is rather that of a glowing molten metal than that of a burning furnace. But it is impossible that the sun should constantly be giving out heat, without either losing heat or being supplied with new fuel.”
And they scratched their heads. They then went on to ponder what stoked that great incandescent body, “assuming that the heat of the sun has been kept up by meteoric bodies falling into it…”
It’s easy to laugh at the wrong questions asked in earlier eras, but we all have to ask the wrong questions until we stumble upon the rich, delicious questions that open up into gardens of utterly unforseen new territories full of wondrous new questions.
Also, hydrogen? Who ever would have imagined.
It is the sun.
•I love that for the most part we do not wonder about it. It is the sun. Perhaps our Homininian grand aunties looked up there and wondered, “how does it do that?“ Or, perhaps Lucy and her babies just walked beneath it, feeling caressed, getting burned, craving and cursing it, like we all do, for the most part. Most of the time we don’t give much thought to the sun. It gives us life whether we think of it or not. Same as our own heart. Once, a friend who was taking a child development class as part of her counseling psychology program, told me that her professor told the class, “if your children take you for granted, you’ve done a good job as a parent.”
•Another thing I love about the sun is the moon. That from where we stand, the sun and moon appear to be the same size. It’s… I want to say: the Prime Coincidence. The sun and moon are nowhere near the same size. The sun’s diameter is 845,000 miles across. The diameter of the moon is 2159 miles across. But, from here they each take about 1° of sky, which, if you hold your arm out straight in front of you, you can eclipse pretty neatly with the tip of your thumb. Put one atop the other and the moon and the sun blot one another almost perfectly. Such an elegant matching set, a perfectly mated pair. I can’t help but feel that sexual reproduction became life’s go-to on our planet because of our matching sun and moon. Not, like, the literal reason, but the poetic reason. Like, it’s just built into the industrial design of this place. It’s built into the music of this place.
•I love the yellow of the sun. It's the best of yellows.
•I also love this passage that Rilke wrote in a letter to his wife Clara about the opposite color of the sun:
“… never have I been so touched and almost gripped by the sight of heather as the other day, when I found these three branches in your dear letter. Since then they are lying in my Book of Images, penetrating it with their strong and serious smell, which is really just the fragrance of autumn earth. But how glorious it is, this fragrance. At no other time, it seems to me, does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more than honeysweet where you feel it is close to touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost, and yet again wind; tar and turpentine and Ceylon tea. Serious and poor, like the smell of a begging monk and yet again hearty and resinous like precious incense. And the way they look: like embroidery, splendid; like three cypresses woven into a Persian rug with violet silk (a violet of such vehement moistness, as if it were the complementary color of the sun).”
•I love the red of the sun, too. I love gazing at the sun when it is sinking into the ocean and it gets distorted and strange, like a bloop in a lava lamp, as it passes through the thick edge of the atmosphere. Even then, I have trouble holding its gaze, because it is the sun.
•I love that when the sun is in the sky, it’s the only thing up there. One night last summer I went out just after sunset and Venus was so high, so dazzlingly bright that I felt sure that I’d be able to see it up there the next day when I scanned east along the ecliptic. It was around noon, but still I felt I should have been able to make it out. Even if just as some faint little beauty mark on the smooth blue cheek of the sky. But, no, not at all. When the sun is high up there, it’s the only star in all the sky.
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Oh, your lemons! Look at us channeling yellow! ✨🍋💛🐣✨
...maybe it’s that ancient impulse to cling to the sun. Some part of us is still scared that it’s going to disappear under the moon and never come back.
There’s some chamisa blooming right outside my door. I’m going to make a little altar of yellow for the sun. 💛 Just in case it’s tempted to stay gone.
I love this post, and I love that we are independently channeling yellow 😂
I did my daily 10 minutes before I saw this!