Umbilically Yours: A Love Letter to the Sun

During this week’s eclipse I felt a cosmic chill, vulnerable, exposed, it was another humbling in a long line of humblings.

Dear Sun,

When you hid behind the moon this week, I felt not just a physical chill but a cosmic one—a sobering reminder of how utterly dependent I am on you. If you changed or fizzled out, I’d be toast. Literal toast. Despite all my education and progress and technology and confidence, I’d be reduced to crumbs.

At the peak of the eclipse, which for us in LA was around 11:11, I took off my glasses and glanced around my yard. It felt spooky as the air took on a gray, silvery quality. The temperature dropped, an eerie silence hung in the air, and the birds seemed to chirp frantically. I suddenly felt exposed, as if I was attached to you by some cosmic umbilical cord that could easily be severed.

How long would we last if you puttered? Days. Maybe a week. As a heat sink, Earth would retain warmth for a while, but scientists predict we'd be below 0 degrees within a week.

Brrrr. I’m already shivering.

That kind of vulnerability is unsettling.

But it’s also thrilling. And humbling. And amazing when you think of how remote we are, floating in the universe, a mere speck at best, a Goldilocks distance from the sun, not too close, not too far, circling in a gravitational orbit, year after year, millennia after millennia, so precarious, yet so constant. It’s this delicate balance of cosmic forces that humbles me. It’s the vastness of space that hurts my brain. It’s the degree of your heat that’s inconceivable.

But I kind of like this razor’s edge of existence. It shifts my perspective, not only of how I view myself, but also how I view others. In my little world I notice all the differences between us, like smarts and gender and clothes, and our various shades. But from your vantage point, some 93 million miles away, we are all just souls, eight billion of us, scurrying around our little patch of the planet, fixated on our own tiny problems. We are just souls wrapped in a body.

So, thank you for that shift. Thank you for your perspective (and for your warmth). It prompts me to attend to my soul. It prompts me to make sure I take care of the most important thing about me. It motivates me to prioritize soulcare over healthcare. And it encourages me to see the soul in other people and not just their skin.

I think we have a few years left with you, dear Sun. NASA predicts another 5 billion. Okay, okay, maybe the cord can’t be severed as easily as it seemed on Monday when you hid behind the moon. But still, I want to remember what I felt. I want to remember what’s important. Thanks for that reminder.

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