We know a lot about the sun – its distance and size and age and makeup. Technology even allows us to see it up close. But we don't know it the way trees and birds and animals do. We did once. Our ancestors worshipped it. In "Sunday Morning," Wallace Stevens imagined a revival of such piety:
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
And D. H. Lawrence ended his last book, Apocalypse, with this admonition: "Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen."
We could do worse. We probably already have.
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