Sun, Sun, Sunx
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Greetings, respected Canaries! I hope this transmission via Cyberspace finds you breathing clean air. There’s not much of it here, I’m afraid, as my perch overlooks the 76th largest city on the planet Earth. That’s a pretty big mine. Here in Texas, it’s summer again already. The summer seems to take up more of each year, every year here, like a Twilight Zone season that just won’t end. What’s amazing is that we humans have a truly uncanny ability to acclimate ourselves to such extremes as sustained high temperatures capable of killing most living things.

The Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother in a letter that “...a great deal of light falls on everything.” Nowhere, not even in southern France, is this more true than it is in Texas. And if light has a spiritual component, I for one am relieved to imagine that there might be a redeeming value to the blasting furnace of light and heat that is with us most of the year here. The light is so hot, it’s white. At times I can almost hear the light: it has a shrill, static-like electric buzz. Visually, its aesthetic is high contrast: the light is so bright, it burns out everything it falls directly on. This causes everything else to be seen as shadow and silhouette, or as burnt tints of faint color, left parched and faded by the sun’s relentless assault.

In 1995, NASA and ESA, the European Space Agency, collaborated on a project to send a spacecraft into deep space to take vacation snap-shots of the sun. I remember how completely awed I was that first summer, as I watched almost-live-action animated photos of the sun on the internet, complete with solar flares. It is a writhing, living thing, this galactic star of ours, and after seeing the unimaginable enormity of exploding light around which we orbit, there’s no more need to wonder why Earth is such an intense place. Observing solar weather seems like an extreme skill for humans to have acquired. We can actually watch this galactic reality show from our living rooms. Check out the action in space at SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.

Snapshots of the sun from SOHO observatory

There’s a longtime scientific debate about what light really is. The most current conclusion is that it’s both a particle and a wave, it’s a material substance as well as pure energy. Translated, this seems to say that matter is frozen light. And since the atom is supposedly 99.9 percent empty space, these two theories seem compatible. It’s ideas like these that have brought the concepts of physics and ancient spiritual wisdom into unison. The raw substance of our lives, apparently, is just one great big light show. Not just our world, but us too: what we call our body is just a bunch of living cells, and as it turns out, living cells emit light. We’re part of the light show too!

One of the few direct quotes attributed to God was “Let There Be Light,” so it’s not such a long shot to guess that this might’ve been a good idea. Not to seem ungrateful for this life-sustaining gift, but this creative flourish seems to have been a little heavy-handed here in Texas. Annie Dillard wrote “If we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light. When too much light falls on everything, a special terror results.”

So speaks a soul of her vulnerability in the mines.

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