Growing up, I spent most of my summers at my Grandmother’s lake in Minnesota. One of my favorite memories is when I would take the canoe out on the lake around twilight. Usually, in that hour between light and dark, the lake would take on a glass-like calm. It was then that you could paddle out onto the lake, gliding through the water with the only sounds being the whoosh of your oar, the occasional glup of a fish eating at the surface, and the lonely calls of distant loons.

When you paddle through calm water, the water rushes in behind your oar creating vortices. This always happens. It is basic physics. But in calm water you can see these spirals of water clearly, and they can last a very long time. The interesting thing about these water spirals is how they spin through the water. You can watch one form, drift slowly, and die as if it is a single entity. But in reality, these spirals are a form the water takes. The spiral is made of water, but not the same water for its whole existence. Water molecules are caught up by the spiral, make a swirling dance within it, and then return to the stillness of the lake. The spiral moves on, flowing through the calm.

Humans, as with all living things, are much the same. Our bodies are a dance of atoms forged in stars. We move through the world as a single pattern. But the physical world flows through us. The air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, becomes a part of us for a time. They join us in our dance only to leave after a time.

We borrow our existence from the cosmos. We flow on until, like spirals of water, we fade back into the calm.

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We often measure our lives in terms of the Sun.  Relative to the stars, the Earth rotates once every 23 hours and 56 minutes.   But we like to measure our days from noon to noon (or midnight to midnight), and that takes an extra few minutes because of the Earth’s motion around the Sun.  So we measure a day as 24 hours.  The motion of the Earth around the Sun also means the Sun appears to move across the sky relative to the stars.  About every 365.25 days its path repeats itself.

Well, not quite.  The Sun is moving relative to other stars.  The solar system is orbiting the galaxy about once every 240 million years.  So by the time the Earth makes a complete circuit around the Sun it hasn’t really returned to its point of origin.  But because even the closest stars are light years away, their motion over a year is small, and so the Sun appears to return to its same position in the sky year after year.

And because the Sun governs the seasons, and we mark our days on the cycles of the Sun, we give a certain significance to the days when the Sun returns to the place that marked our birth.  Perhaps it is a last remnant of that ancient and debunked astrology.  Perhaps it is our nature as astronomers. Whatever the reason, we mark these days, and ponder their significance.

And on these days, for some strange reason, we like to put small wax pillars onto sweet baked goods and set them on fire.

Such is life on this small planet.

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