Celebrating Sun and Solstice – Words of the Land

Consider sunlight. It’s not just up there blazing down. Sun energy is within you, steadily firing your body and brain every millisecond of your life. That’s not poetic; it’s true! Feel it.

Vegetarian or not, you’ve ingested whole fields of plants, entire orchards of juicy fruits over your life’s decades. These plants are all sun-eating specialists who spend their days capturing and storing sunlight energy through the extraordinary magic of photosynthesis. As you’ve munched, the stored sunlight energy held dynamically in leaves, stems, roots, seeds and fruits has passed into your body and cells. It’s that light energy, captured and held within your cells, that you are now releasing, like steady sun rays, as you go about the business of your athletic or mentally demanding day.

If you’re not a vegetarian, the sun energy had to travel another link or two along the food chain, from grass to cow, from seed to chicken, from leaf to deer, before you take it in, but sun it remains. Seafood eaters get their sunlight energy by way of phytoplankton (itsy plants) sunbathing and lunching in the upper layers of the oceans, who pass the sun up the salty food chain to shellfish, tunas, snappers and all their cousins generously arranged on your plate. Brilliant flashing sunlight all.

Even if you’re a packaged food junkie and three dozen ingredients are listed on the label of your favorite snack, don’t forget that even the nastiest one can be traced back to the sun! Petroleum-based flavorings and preservatives started out (before being messed with by sun-powered mad scientists) in a prehistoric fern munching on prehistoric sun.

All this is to say that you’re burning (releasing, expressing) stored sunlight energy in every fluid movement, every subtle anatomical process, every brilliant thought. The radiant sun that’s soaking into all the green leaves around you and fuels the nectar-powered whirring hummingbird wings that just buzzed by, and fires that impressive squirrel leap that you witnessed this morning, is shining inside you, too. Sun-life is burning and expressing all around us, within us, as us. Consider sunlight.

Read this week’s poem: There is a Fire