Fire in the Lake 3

Fire in the lake - Above, a lake of fire, the fire of volcanic activity. It has often seemed strange to me that we are burning "fossil fuels" (incompletely combusted light-energized carbon compounds) when we are essentially on an 8000-mile diameter ball of hot rock which has a thin shell. Fracking, which involves horizontal drilling at depths in the shell, begs the question of why we are not directing more intelligence to using the heat beneath our feet. Geothermal.

Layers of the Earth (YouTube video - 2:45)

"...and let's discuss: the inner core, outer core, mantle and crust..."

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To figure out the size of the molten rock ball we are on, it took a pillar, a well, an 800 kilometer hike, and a Summer solstice day. "Sticks at different angles to the sun's rays will cast shadows of different length." 

Cosmos - Eratosthenes calculates Earth's circumference (YouTube video - 6:34)

Carl Sagan tells the tale of how Alexandria's chief librarian, upon reading about the Sun lighting up the bottom of a well in a town much further south on the Summer solstice day - something that did not occur in Alexandria on the same day - devised a way to measure the earth's circumference, 2200 years ago.

The World is Round/Size of the Earth (YouTube video - 2:01)

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Fire in the Lake, June 22

Sun, and Water planet Earth

Fire in the Lake , June 22

Driving past St Mary's lake, the sun was glinting off the lake, setting the rippled waves ablaze with reflected and refracted light. As light sinks into the lake, life grows.

The image of sunlight into water, and calling it Revolution, brings one to seeing life as revolution. It can never stand still – it would decay, atrophy, eventually dwindle into inertia. Light mingling with water gives us life at every turning – a critical ingredient, besides carbon dioxide, is water, to the trilogy of photosynthesis. Water, carbon dioxide, and light - and you’ve got plant life.  Or rather, we have it now, after billions of years of evolution. Long before that, our ingredients were but atoms formed in ancient stardust – life is an amazing moving wonder, overturning the established order, setting the stage for continual change; fire in the lake, Revolution.

So I get home and see the door open to the solar water heater tank: I’m looking down now at "Solar Boiler" - while thinking of Sun light steaming clouds off the equator of our planet, starting the winds of water vapour transfer that support life towards the poles of our tilted-spin Earth.

(Tilted only to our orbit’s plane...or should we say corkscrew path, for Earth follows the Sun in a spiral, leading with the South pole, anti-clockwise turning (if looked at from the North pole) following a Sun that moves 12 miles per second towards the distant constellation Hercules. Helical path. Helios – the Sun.)

It does seem a fitting description of life, constant revolution, because life must be revolting against established order to stay alive. Light mixing in with the fluid medium of water - that most amazing of fluids that surrounds us (tastes so great!) - or perhaps to be seen as a cascading tumble of photons, caught in the complexities photosynthesis allows plants to build. We eat these bundles of stored energy, and further energy cascades throughout our digestive systems, circulatory, excretory, nerve, thought and muscle systems allow us to move with apparent free will.

We are the fire moving in water.

 ...exhaling carbon dioxide and water vapour on our breath. We are that linked with sunlight, always.

Fire in the Lake

FIRE IN THE LAKE

The Image:    [I Ching, Wilhelm/Baynes translation, 49]

Fire in the lake: the image of REVOLUTION.
Thus the superior man
Sets the calendar in order
And makes the seasons clear.

                   

June 21, 2011...the longest day, we say, in the Northern hemisphere of our off-tilt spinning globe.

In Canada we experience the most insolation we will receive all year in a single spin of our planet (while the Southern hemisphere receives its least).

And then, the darkness will increase.The lack of energy, and the certainty of its further diminishment from this one long-sunned beautiful day will have its effect on the organic world – all the beautiful plants that began their growth in the Spring are probably at their most luxuriant (lux = light) today. But perhaps you'll notice a few days after the summer solstice the first yellow leaves appearing in trees. Today we begin the long gradual descent of daily light energy.

Plants go through the cycle of preparing seeds, while their main life-form gradually fades and dies back or hibernates. Most plant and animal and bird and fish rhythms are seasonal, depending on the energy received...photons into blades of grass, or leaves, or plankton...and the feeding of life-forms on these. Life is always after energy, running on light.

The relevant parts in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching are:

“Times change, and with them their demands. Thus the seasons change in the course of the year. In the world cycle also there are spring and autumn in the life of peoples and nations, and these call for social transformations.

 “Fire below and the lake above combat and destroy each other. [Think of sunlight shining on the water planet.] So too in the course of the year a combat takes place between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, eventuating in the revolution of the seasons. Man masters these changes in nature by noting their regularity and marking off the passage of time accordingly. In this way order and clarity appear in the apparently chaotic changes of the seasons, and man is able to adjust himself in advance to the demands of the different times.” (page 190).

While I would question "apparently chaotic", it is apparent that all of life on our planet is dependent on photons, their density and intensity. With rising light, rising life. With diminishing energy, cyclical survival strategies.

Once there were Chariots

Once there were Chariots, and it was reckoned by some that the Sun was pulled around in one.     SunWind's latest product offering is our Chariot of the Sun, invented by Arnold McCutcheon. This uni-axle, gear-driven solar-receptive set of CD wheels spins sunlight into motion. 

http://www.sunwindsolar.com/a_scripts/n_kits_chariot.php