The Dark Rays of the Sun

September soliloquies, part III

Photo: M-Class (nearly X-class) Solar flare, Sept. 21 2023

All this being said, I must confess I love the people I work with. But I love who they are and what they do more than I love the ideas we exchange. It’s their chemistry, their presence, the molecules that make them human that I love. These things are in many ways worth more than any "work" that we might do, because it’s our chemistry that makes us human, and I love human beings.

Not all of us, after all, are truly human; I sometimes referred to my own life as "life among the heathen.”

As one re-discovers a cosmological sense of one's self, one realizes that one is surrounded to some extent by aliens — we’re all aliens to one another. We came from other places to inhabit this planet; we don't even know what those places were, despite all our sciences. In fact where we came from is a much greater mystery than we think, and our scientific explanations are wholly inadequate.

Another impression from this week was riding along the Hudson river on my bike, coming back from my work place in Hell’s Kitchen, as it is so aptly named. (I think we should probably rename the entire planet Hell’s Kitchen, but that's another subject.) That impression was the impression of the moon against the blue sky, waxing but only a third of the way there. It speaks to something ancient in the body that there is a moon and it can be seen.