BY HANNES THUM
I’ve been noticing something about the sun lately. For the past few months, as I read my book on my couch in the evening (and I have been reading my book on my couch a lot these past few months), the evening sun has been shining in my eyes for longer each evening as it heads down toward the horizon for the night. We all, surely, have noticed how much longer the days are at this time of the year. Depending on your couch-to-window orientation, you may have even been annoyed by how long the sun hangs there, blinding you when you’re trying to read.
But, that’s about to change.
This year, the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere fell on June 20. That means that, because of the way our earth rotates around our sun, June 20 was both the longest day of the year and the point in the year when our little place on the planet was pointed as directly toward the sun as it will be all year. Thus the fact that many people use the summer solstice to mark the official start of summer.
The word solstice comes from Latin roots of “stop” and “sun”—the sun, on that date, stopped getting higher in the sky each day and will now start getting lower in the sky.
I have to admit, I am not sure how long it would have taken me to notice that from my couch perch if it weren’t for the calendar on my wall drawing my attention to it. I think we just don’t have the same connection to the sky as we once did.
But, maybe there’s something in our species that still calls us to look upwards.
Kids still love to lie on their backs in the grass and call out the shapes they see in the clouds (“that one looks like a dinosaur!” is my favorite, but “that one looks like a face” seems to be the most common, which could lead us into another fascinating digression about how well-tuned our brains are to recognize faces). Sunrises and sunsets still capture the attention of all of us, young and old. Most of us take note of full moons. And all of us have been transfixed looking at the stars on those perfect star-gazing nights.
For me, the sky is a reminder of our place in the universe, but not just because we are tiny and the sky is huge and the stars are so far away and all of that. Rather, what strikes me about the things in the sky, and especially the cycles of those things, is the sense of movement: we are not a still planet hanging motionless in a soup of space. We travel, on this round-shaped, blue-and-green-and-white spaceship, great loops around a pretty gosh darned magnificent area, which is full of other neat-looking spaceships making their own loops and journeys. The sky itself, right above our heads, then becomes like the window of a train or of a plane that we can look out of and see our surroundings fly past.