We obsess about the weather, it’s a benign observance: no culpability save whoever is on the other side of your climate change believe system – however, weather is just the most obvious truth we seem to ignore with universal indifference: the sun makes the weather more than any other influence – it’s the sole source of temperature, and the rotational centerline incline that makes the earth’s seasons simply accepts the same energy at difference angles, making some places warmer and some places colder at different times in our orbit.
Duh.
Sometimes the obvious reveals ignorance. As I deal with the sun’s presence and absence in the several thousand plants that have either lived or died in my 30 year care, it’s the sun that allows for life, or in its inadequacy, kills what I plant.
Nature is the metaphor humans use most to make sense of the infinite unknowables we whistle past every day.
At the center of the solar system is the center of pretty much every natural metaphoric opportunity. The sun operates in a life cycle of billions of years that makes or days, years, millennia absurdly insignificant. Before we could actually see what the sun was, we, of course, thought it was our God given lamp post, space heater and night light (via the moon).
Creating food, versus finding it, forced us to deal with the sun, and it’s absence – and it’s grinding unrelenting reality means we bent to it.
As I design buildings what the allow inhabitants to see the views on their land, the weather they shed, the forces they resist and how their occupants use them all shape what I draw. But more than any other input, where the sun is defines how the building lays on the land and how it’s spaces are then laid out in that position.
We wake to it, we sleep when it’s gone (unless some Internet obsession, career choice or lifestyle anomaly wrecks that rhythm). We opt for shade, we opt for sunbathing.
But every piece of food, every bit of sensory input, has in some way gotten all (all) of its propagating energy from that huge nuclear fusion furnace 93 million million miles away.
Now that we can microscopically recreate that source of energy to create power – and kill ourselves pretty effectively – perhaps we can more effectively pretend we are brown-out resistant.
But all life on this one parcel of creation has had its fundamental design completely locked into sucking energy out of the sun.
We, and every other living thing, are light addicts. All the musing, implementing, good works venal acts, constructions, destructions and art itself come down to using the energy that dumbly falls on our raw rock.
It’s the light’s fertilizing flow that made every ounce of dirt, every gram of food, and every basis for our sense of time.
Funny we don’t worship it any more…
