Thoughts today about the sun, and heat, and people flaring and cooling like emotional embers. 
We see the sun everyday, but people only rarely think about it as more than a big molten ball that’ll give you melanoma if you’re not careful. It’s a constant in all our lives, Earth’s night light. But we forget that its got an identity all its own, and it’s in motion as well.
If you were to close the distance, somehow leap from a sandy beach the million kilometers to the fringe of the sun’s solar shore, you’d see a real show. Huge plumes of solar energy arcing out from its surface, hot spots and cold spots flowing in cells across its face, a display you’d never forget. And beneath the glowing exterior another show goes on, unseen: elements being built, then ripped apart, then made again, heavier, then torn in two, and again put back together. Over and over. A molten chemical bath the size of a hundred thousand earths.
Isaac Newton lost his sight for four days after staring at the sun too long. I can’t remember the last time I was that mesmerized by anything that strongly. Makes me wonder if sunglasses and black out curtains are to blame. Apathy seems easier to come by when you live in a dim world.
The truth is though, I see the sun in everything.
And what I mean by that is the patterns, the motion, the entropy, and the overall physics of that big molten ball apply just the same to me and you and the oak tree I passed on the trail yesterday. Everything works the same when you look at the roots.
We consume. And produce. Input and output. What we take we have to eventually give back. Yin and yang. Balance. This principle applies to everything around us. It’s the commandment best suited to regulating a self-contained system of beautifully flawed entropic creatures, the law best tailored to order the world we live in.
I’ll bring it back to people. Hmm…alright so inside the the sun there’s all this heat and energy going around causing atoms to get excited, jump around, make new and different shapes right? People can do that too. Not in the exact same way, but still.
Here’s an example: I eat a piece of toast with eggs and bacon for breakfast in the morning. It gives me the energy to go to work. Maybe I’m a carpenter and I build a nice clock. Shape it, sand it, put the gears in. And bam, I’ve created something that otherwise would never have been there. I take immense satisfaction in my work, my customer does too. After one last wistful look at my creation, I sell it to him, hoping that what I’ve built will give him pleasure too. Maybe he keeps it for a few decades because the hourly chimes calm him, then he gives it to his kids and so on.
My energy went into creating that clock. The sun’s effort goes into creating light. The clock makes a person happy. The light makes a tree happy (and other things too, namely sunbathing women and cats).
Just a little attempt to show that no matter who or what you are it’s always possible for you to enrich the world around you by radiating your energy outward into the people and things that populate it.
But I digress. This is supposed to be a blog about sore feet and backpacker meals right? Guess somewhere back I took a wrong turn.
Cheers — Nomad