Obseration

I was observing the light on the wall - a stream of sunlight broken by the branches of a tree outside, pouring through window blinds - music playing in the background. I held up my phone and started to record. As the music crescendoed, the shadow’s movement seemed to respond. I continued to record as my heart raced at the enchantment of it, as the light danced to the music, coming to rest as the music did. These moments aren’t always captured. This one was. I can share it with you directly. You can see for yourself…

Investigation

Does the light dance to the music, or does it only appear to do so? 

This is the question I went into this project asking, or presuming to ask. Because I know the light is dancing, or that something, some body is dancing. The light, the tree, the wind, the shadow, the squirrels, the glass, or the body that is formed by all of these things coinciding. 

I am a coincidence of many living creatures.

Microorganisms: bacteria, fungi, archae, viruses…mitochondria.

The idea of “I” that we walk around with is an absurd fiction. That’s OK. I like absurd fictions. But this idea of a body that is not a coincidence of many living creatures is more absurd than recognizing that a coincidence of many earthly beings are dancing to the music as a collective body. 

**

The smallest unit of meaning in language is the morpheme, built from the particles of language we call phonemes. 

The smallest unit of consciousness is Dust. 

Have you ever been mesmerized by the dust floating in a sunbeam, swirling like the building blocks of life in a particle accelerator? A mirror to see ourselves in, dancing as the light does.

Yesterday, lying in bed, I observed the light dancing on my ceiling, projected from the body of water outside my window. I asked this light what it was saying. I asked it to speak in the form of an absurd fictional “I”. It answered,

“All of the stories run through me, streams and raindrops and waves of story. I remember it all. I remember and re-present. The sun swims in my bodies, diving deep, coming up for air. The water dries on your water-speckled skin as you break the surface. As a child you floated, the sun bouncing off the pool’s blue threshold like a satellite traveling the orbit of your heart. You swam to your mother’s legs dangling in the pool, held on tight as she lifted you effortlessly up and down, adrift and secure. Stories go on and on, transmuting from liquid to solid to gas, animated by the sun’s energy and the pull of gravity. There is only one author, the Sun. There is only one storyteller, me. I wrote all the books, including the one you are reading now. It’s my voice there in your hands. It will be my voice you write with.”

Each instance of coinciding earthly creatures that merge briefly into a being that we can name, as a character in an absurd fiction, is like this, like the Storyteller. An expression of the Sun - a reflection of the experience of the Sun. 

I laid down. I took a deep breath, and as I exhaled, I felt my body become heavy as it sank into the earth. It sank deeper and deeper, and as I released my body to the dark and the cold, my breath became easy, the shallow breath of sleep. I imagined the surface of my torso was a still body of water, reflecting the trees rising from its banks, and my breath was like the gentlest breeze drifting over the surface, lightly disturbing the stillness the water always returned to. I imagined a golden light glowing, perhaps pulsing, somewhere in the water’s depths, some kind of promise or reminder. But every thought, feeling, and sensation I became aware of, I placed it in a little bubble and sent it with my breath over the surface of the water, watching it drift away until it disappeared. Every idea I had about what I was doing, every task I wanted to remember that no longer mattered, every sensation of worms crawling around my skin, a pain in my shoulder, the sound of something moving, the sound of electricity running through wires underground, the feeling of fear, the feeling of wonder, the feeling of pride. Each of these I packed into its own little bubble and sent it away. Until I was completely empty--all the noise of the absurd fiction of “me” was gone. And in the absence of all that noise, something else appeared. A different me. A “me” that is not the absurd fiction but another me that is all of us. I used to call this universal consciousness, or simply the Universe. I know there are many names people have used as well for this, for some kind of Consciousness that is Primary in some way. On this day, I called it the Sun. On this day, I realized that the Sun is the Primary Being. Of our universe anyway. And that we are all extensions of the Sun.

This is obvious. That the sun gives life to everything.

*

In 2017, I was in North Carolina for the total solar eclipse. I was at a writing retreat that fell in the path of totality. I stood outside in a clearing in the mountains. What was most memorable was how, in those couple minutes of Sunlessness, the air immediately cooled. Within mere minutes, on a hot August day in the southern United States, the warmth was draining away. And then, the moon completed its path, the Sun came back, and everything warmed up again. What would happen within hours? Within days?  

A reminder that life on Earth depends on the Sun. Life as we know it anyway. What does that common phrase mean, “life as we know it.”

Which “we” does it refer to?

Often, I assume, the “we” refers to humans, to the human experience.

But in this case, let’s take the We to mean the Sun’s experience of the Earth. 

We, as the Sun that we are, would continue our travels elsewhere. Where we already are. We travel throughout the universe, of course. But the experience of Earth, that chapter would come to its close.

The Sun is dancing on the wall to the music that is also the Sun. It is all the Sun.

*****

I have imagined an ontology for all this: The sun--bright star that lights our world--extends its extremities--arms, hands, tendrils--through all those kilometres of space, toward earth. The sun reaches through the atmosphere and touches everything. 

Everything it touches, it animates. 

The air is an alchemical medium. And Wind, as it puts air in motion, makes the Sun perceptible, in sight, for example, as dancing shadows.

The sun is the body, the wind is the blood. As sun and wind mingle with other forms of matter, organisms and objects, the alchemy creates more coinciding earthly beings that, like all things, are constantly in motion.

There is a Sámi folktale that begins in a sunless land, in which two groups of people live apart, though in the darkness, they can hardly see one another. One small group of seventy shadowy siblings lives atop a round mountain, in the middle of the forest, in a log house that is warm and plentiful. The house is surrounded by a wooden fence in which they keep 100,00 reindeer. The rest of the sunless land’s people dwell in huts, woven from switches, covered in bark and moss, that the cruel wind always cuts through. These people live in great misery. One day a stranger appears to the hut-dwellers, riding a beautiful reindeer, to tell them about the existence of the Sun, and that if they find the Sun, the land will become warm and bright. The shadowy siblings overhear the man and scold the people, “Foolish hut-dwellers! Why are you listening to this stranger's nonsense? How could something exist if no one has seen it before? He is only here to rile you up! He deserves a beating for telling you made-up tales!” The hut-dwellers shrink in fear and agree among them that the shadowy siblings are probably right. The stranger sighs and his eyes dim as he turns around and rides his reindeer away, saying. “From this day on I will only appear to those who believe in the existence of the Sun.” And sure enough, there is one girl among the hut-dwellers, poor as the rest, but who never bows down to or begs from the shadowy siblings. Even as time goes on and everyone else forgets about the stranger who promised the Sun, she is determined to find it. One day she yells into the darkness, “I believe in the Sun. But how do I find the stranger again?” As soon as she speaks the words, the moss and lichen parts and a beautiful reindeer appears. It instructs the girl to get on its back and swiftly brings her to the stranger. He instructs her to weave a basket using one hair from every hut-dweller. She returns to her people, convincing them to each give her a single hair. She weaves for 70 days and 70 nights, and then announces to the empty sky that she has completed the basket. The reindeer appears again, takes her on its back, and this time gallops across the land until the girl suddenly sees a red light glowing at the horizon. The reindeer asks if she is afraid of fire, and she replies that she is not afraid of anything. So the reindeer charges at the Red Sun, its antler breaking off a piece that falls into the basket that she holds in her hands. The girl brings the basket with the piece of the Sun back to her people, but the shadowy siblings are there too, threatening, “Don't you dare let out the Sun! The lakes will dry up! The iron will melt in the ground and flood our houses! You will go blind and we will all burn!” They try to drag the girl to the swamp to drown her, but her people, for the first time, rise up against the shadowy siblings, and a great battle takes place. In the middle of it, suddenly the basket opens wide, and the first ray of sunshine breaks out. The sky turns red with light, the swamps are bathed in the colors of dawn. The shadowy siblings all burn, their ashes falling into the swamp. The hut-dwellers marvel at the sky, bright rays of sunlight, as the water of the lakes turn blue, and the mosses and lichens gain bright colors. They all turn to the girl, amazed and proud of her, and ask, “Now we know and can see that the Sun exists. But this is only a small piece of it. How can we get the whole Sun?” At that moment, the magic reindeer appears once more and tells the girl what must be done. She turns to the people and says, “Go to the house of the shadowy siblings. Break down the fence, and bring the reindeer here. They belong to you now.” The hut-dwellers break down the fence, and herd the hundred thousand reindeer of the mountain back to their home. The girl asks, “Are you not afraid of fire?” “We are not afraid of anything,” they respond. “Then ride toward the Sun with an open heart." The people ride fast at the Sun, each of them taking a ray of sunshine into their hearts, a hundred thousand hearts warming up. “Now, line up the reindeer!” the girl calls. Once they are all lined up, the magic reindeer pokes at the sun with its antler, until the Sun slides off the sky, and comes to rest on the backs of the animals. The hundred thousand hut-dwellers set out on the hundred thousand reindeer, all balancing the Sun on their antlers carefully, transforming the Sunless land forever.