Sun day

The sun comes up, we say, every day and from where I sit it is true. This morning I have watched it lift itself up above the dark strip of McNab’s Island and the not quite so dark strip of grey cloud above it until it now shines on one side of my face and shoulder while I write. The sky to the north is a fresh washed blue with a scattering of small white clouds and the trees outside the window are illuminated like a manuscript. It is our sun and it has come up again.

I do know that it isn’t quite accurate to say that the sun comes up. I understand because I have been told that the sun is somewhere out there, a star in space, and that we move around it in the long ellipse of each year that passes. I also understand that we ride around on our globe as it turns on its axis once every day. A truer statement then would be that the harbour and McNab’s and Eastern Passage beyond it and the drifts and shifts of clouds are all really turning and dropping as we slowly spin around to face our golden star. It isn’t easy from this vantage point to hold that image in my mind and to understand the huge roundness of our planet turning inexorably in elation to the sun.

There, in that last sentence, I thought I typed “relation”. It was part of my plodding attempt through language to get at the notion of a huge curved surface that gradually turns from east to west bringing us into the light. I pictured the leading edge of that light moving across the ruffled Atlantic toward us and the band of shadow receding across our continent in front of it as we move from night’s shadow into day’s light and revolve toward the next darkness as the shadow comes round again. But that’s the large concepts of the physics, or geophysics, or astronomical dynamics, or whatever science it is that tries to describe our own earth and its relation to our sun. The whole earth view, important as it is for us to hold and consider, takes second place for me this morning to the particular and the local, this “elation to the sun”, the way birds wake up to sing on a spring morning and this warm shine in our room on a Sunday morning when we observe our golden star rising and climbing the sky.

It is our quotidian delight, this knowledge we build our lives on, that the sun will rise, and that the day will (we must hope) seem fresh and feel new.