As the last of the leaves fall in my neighborhood, and a deeper chill sharpens the air, winter's arrival feels almost upon us. When I walk the dog in the morning, the rising of the sun tells that truth too. It's lower on the horizon, and the shadows it casts stretch across lawns and gardens even at the height of the day.
Though winter remains technically weeks away, it feels present, nipping at my face and fingers.
That rising sun leavens the bitterness, light and heat pressing through the almost leafless trees as it crests the rise to the east. The dark fabric of my winter coat absorbs its energies. It feels quite pleasant.
I meditated on this on a recent walk. What we experience of our friendly neighborhood G-class main sequence star is light and heat. What else is a star, after all, but light and heat?
All of those energies rise from the sun's visible surface, the crackling seething radiance of the ten thousand degree photosphere. Above that rage the fires and mass ejections of the sun's coronal atmosphere, which is paradoxically much, much hotter, millions of degrees hotter. Our mental image of the sun is precisely that, a bright sphere surrounded by flame, planted in the upper right corner of a child's drawing.
But that radiance is not what makes a star a star. What makes a star burn bright in the heavens is fusion, as hydrogen is gravitically compressed into helium, which is in turn torn into hydrogen, which is again compressed into helium, each reaction releasing the immense self-sustaining energies that fill the heavens with light and heat. On this little world, it's what sustains the existence of every living thing.
That process, we do not see. It lies deep in the heart of the sun, out of view and unviewable.
On that cold morning, I mused on how that can mirror the human tendency to mistake the energies of our raging at one another for the heart of human purpose. What we see, as we compulsively tell stories of wars and rumors of wars, is not the engine upon which we rely for our being. What we experience, as we lose ourselves in parasocial relationships with celebrity and influence, is not the essence of our personhood.
None of these things, bright and hot as they are, is the truth and life of us.
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