Getting out of the house has been imperative this half term week, with and without the children. The sky is brightening, the birds are singing, I’m with the kids 24 hours a day, they’re a bit fed up, the house is covered in dust and all that together means the urge is strong. Thankfully I had a few walks organised with friends and the boys mainly succumbed to cake bribes.
Having walked around Wanstead Park pond three times in three days my hiking boots that have never been worn so much in their lives, are absolutely caked in mud having purposely walked through the deepest bits of quagmire because I could. Cheap thrills where you can get them.
Over the course of these walks I’ve seen fiery sunrises, budding branches, perennial growth and this morning so many birds: robins, tits, jays and woodpeckers flitting about in the trees; swans and geese wandering around on the banks. Nature responding to the cyclical pull of the sun.
I’ve written a lot about the sun in this journal because it really does have the biggest influence on our lives and moods – a huge ball of hot plasma emitting electromagnetic energy in the form of visible light and infrared radiation. In five billion years it will apparently grow so large it will become a red giant that will engulf Venus, Mars and probably Earth. Right now it drenches us in beaming hope.
After all this huge star is quite literally the central force of our Solar System (clue in the name there) comprising 99.86 percent of its whole mass, with its suite of terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars), gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn), ice giants (Uranus and Jupiter), dwarf planets, moons, asteroid belt, comets and icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune.
We often worship the sun in reference to the weather or holidays but it’s so much more than that: it’s our seasons, our day and night, our guiding light, our warmth, our life force, and our past, present and future. As the dark days give way to brighter ones as we head into spring and summer, I’ll be holding onto the magnitude of that. – a daily Gayatri Mantra for my soul.