The Sun for Summer
By Peter Finlay
What is making me think of the Sun? Well, it is the first day of June and of course now we will have days of endless sunshine. Maybe! But what started me was not the date so much as the pile of cardboard boxes I had to dispose of. Unlikely but true! Far too many of them, and so they had to be cut into small pieces and fed into my wood burner. Some heat! That had me thinking of the Sun which (I believe) is really, really hot. Maybe it is in truth just a huge mass of cardboard boxes someone is trying to dispose of up there. I don’t actually think so. But perhaps the truth is almost as unlikely. After all a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion (and so on and on and on) tons of hydrogen gas is not the sort of thing one would expect anywhere at all, least of all in one’s backyard. And yet there it is – or was, as it is no longer gas but the most utterly unimaginable raging furnace. Far more raging hot than even my wood burner ever comes near to being (Whew!). It all just sounds a bit too dangerous and, besides, could there really be summer as we know it if we were in effect living in permanent close proximity to a world war to end all world wars ransacking the universe next door? H bombs galore!
But really really really, what an utterly amazing thing is our Sun, cardboard boxes, tons of hydrogen, H bombs or whatever it might be. There it is – whenever we can actually see it – hung from nothing in a vast black (or blue?) space, a space which is every bit as mysterious as the Sun itself. Not an any old space but Space itself. A Space as amazingly beautiful as is our Sun in fact. Our Sun could have been in a kind of rubbish tip maybe with nothing but rotting rubbish all around it. Of course that is simply very silly nonsense. But it might have been – and then we would not have had the glorious gift of a Sun so delicately there in its vast Space in all its clarity all around us. ‘The Sun whose rays are all ablaze with ever living glory…’ if you like Gilbert and Sullivan. Or simply the Sun, whether of astronomy or of nothing more sophisticated than our own every day experience.
Not only is it delicately balanced in Space it exists in a delicate balance with everything. Its powerful rays transform the plants that spring from the soil until, through their chlorophyll, they clothe the planet with a green mantle. That most restful of colours, the colour of the pastures where the shepherd leads his flocks and where they can lie down and where we all can find soul restoration.
We have some pictures here – first of the Sun shining in its utter splendour (featured image, credit Unsplash) – the most powerful physical thing in our environment. Powerful yet somehow gentle too in a way not very often associated with power, not political power certainly. Then the possible original home of the Sun, an even more unimaginably vast object known as a Black Hole. It is shown surrounded by a swirling disk of material falling onto it.
And finally, in a photo I took this morning, back to more familiar home territory with the restful beauty of the green grass and trees, a flower bedecked meadow leading up to a sunlit Goatfell in its azure setting.
I have no great liking for cardboard boxes, but even cardboard boxes can lead us on quite interesting journeys when transformed in a wood burning stove!
