This morning as I was in the kitchen getting the normal things started - food for the cats and a pot of coffee - I looked out the window at the light from the morning sun on the bricks of the house next door.
Bright, warm, sunlight. The source of all the energy that makes life on this planet. People in times past were right to recognize the sun as the life-giving power, as a god. We take it for granted now, because we understand it not as a personified power, but as a huge gas ball in the sky that fuses hydrogen into helium and emits great amounts of energy.
But it isn't like a light bulb in the sky that provides us with some conviences. It is the source. We exist only because of it, and when it stops producing energy we, or whatever life is extant at that time, will cease to exist.
As I thought about the integrating source of the sun for all life, I took a breath. Without the constant replenishment of oxygen in the air, a process driven, as is everything, by the sun's energy, I would not live more than a few moments. Where did the oxygen I breath this minute come from? I have no way to know, and no control over it. It is there as part of the world that supports my existence - the world I am part of - and have no separate existence from.
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