Transit of the gods.

Generally speaking, in day-to-day life, the sun is a familiar object. Someone might say: “What’s that?” And you’ll reply, “Oh don’t be silly, that’s the sun.” Or: “Where’s the sun; oh, never mind. There it is, behind that tree.” We are sun-kissed, we are with sunshine on our shoulders, it looks like we got a little sun on our nose. The sun is with us, right there, in the sky, behind that cloud, just like the airplanes. It is immediate.

Conversely, the planets are celestial objects. We know from grade school what they are, but when we see them, we usually see them as stars with less-predictable positions. They are out there, beyond, they are places of imagination and dreams, or science (-fiction) epic travels.

Twice a century or so, we are faced with the peril of paradigm shift. Last night, Venus crossed between us and the sun. If you saw it, and could not avoid falling into contemplation about what was happening, you faced the danger of two possible, dizzying shifts in perspective:

1) The sun, our familiar, was shining brightly as it always does; right there, up in the sky. But, if you looked closely with the right equipment, something dark was on the surface: a blemish. What could it be? It was Venus of course: that celestial harbinger of both night and day. How could this be? How could this remote celestial body come between us and our familiar sun?...

SHIFT

...our familiar sun is celestial too: so very far away. Perspective comes roaring in with mighty vengeance! The solar system is enormous; Venus, nearly the size of Earth, which is itself almost impossible to imagine in its breadth, is a tiny little dot in front of the sun, which is twice as far away from Venus as Venus is to us, so we must be (zipping back, zooming out) impossibly tiny and insignificant; no more to the sun that the smallest virus is to us, except even less than that because we can’t even begin to have any effect on the sun which is impossibly massive and so far........ Breathe. Let it go. Nothing meaningful can ever be done under this paradigm, especially if you then turn to the other stars.

I did not experience that shift. Instead, I experienced:

2) The sun, our familiar, was shining brightly as it always does; right there, up in the sky. But, if you looked closely with the right equipment, something dark was on the surface: a blemish. What could it be? It was Venus of course: that celestial harbinger of both night and day. How could this be? How could this remote celestial body come between us and our familiar sun?...

SHIFT

...Venus, that celestial distant harbinger is familiar too. She’s right there between us and our familiar sun! (Flying out, zooming in) Venus is huge! The sun is even bigger and further, and they are both right here in our own little (solar system-sized) space. Mercury is in there too, riding the inner well of the sun’s gravity like a cosmic daredevil or a coin tossed in the perfect, friction-free donation well, both zipping around like neat little celestial bouncing balls that were thrown by the playful laws of physics, like I would love to throw a ball into a gravity well, and wait, we are flying around on our own enormous planet, and there are more little objects flying around the system with abandon, encountering nothing but the resilient balance between gravity and orbital momentum, and colliding chaotically with gasses and solar winds and sometimes, if you threw the celestial body just right, with another celestial body in a fascinating explosion of energy with pieces and parts rebounding and deforming in ways impossible to predict, but endlessly entertaining to analyze and watch over and over in the vain desire to see, know, and PLAY...

Last night, I became one of the gods!