JEMontclair – I Declared my Love for the Sun
It was a long time ago I declared my love of the Sun to myself. Just out of college, I was attending a human potential seminar where we were to create a symbol for ourselves to meditate on to facilitate our wholeness. Mine was the Sun.
Thirty years later a tattoo of that Sun now graces my right arm, and for balance, the moon is on my left. I like to say, “I am naked between the sun and the moon” referring not only to the absence of tattoos on my body between my flanking arms, but to my heart. Naked. Open. Undisguised. Vulnerable, but STRONG. As difficult as this is at times to walk through life open hearted; I continue to let life touch me. Not that I am not a little jaded, I am. Who hasn’t been been burned by the Sun? By Love?
As a teen I spent summers at the beach; lying in the sunshine all day with nothing but a string bikini, baby oil and a Stephen King novel between me and the rays of the white hot ball of fire in the sky. I’d trace it’s path from the pink dawn of sunrise, as the light emerged from the horizon, till the orange glow of sunset morphed into the dusky light of evening, witnessing the reflection of it’s face in the quiet presence of the moon – pulling the tides, animating the ocean.
I used to tell people I was like a sunflower, turning my face towards the Sun always finding a splash of sunshine to revel in. I am after all a Leo. The Sun is my planet. This longing to be in the sunshine makes perfect sense. Maybe not all women and men are from Venus and Mars. Maybe some women are from the Sun and some men from the Moon.
The first men that walked on the Moon, that most feminine of planets, were transformed by seeing our Home from the vantage point of the Moon. They were moved by Earth’s wholeness, touched by its vulnerability and endurance – its pure unadulterated presence. This “blue marble,” as Earth was described, suspended in the infinite star studded midnight sky with it’s thin fragile layer, not of glass, but of gas – oxygen and ozone; an atmosphere of Love and Fear breathed in and out a million times a day – for better or worse.
The first women that marched to have the right to vote in governmental elections were transformed by the experience of coming together to own their power, demand equality, assert their presence and preference in the white hot spotlight of the press. The quip about feminism,“The radical notion that women are people” fit the suffragist mission then, and the challenges of equality now still facing our society over150 years later. Strong though these women were, and successful too, the goal was not to be like a man, but to enjoy all the rights and privileges that men gave to themselves.
I used to grow anxious, sad, melancholy as the light of day waned. I eventually learned to appreciate the dusky lavenders, the sudden hush and whisper of soft breezes as the day surrendered to the night – ever so slowly; eventually revealing our smallness in a galaxy full of other suns, other planets – the Great Mystery of our improbable existence floating in space on a planet turning ceaselessly from gentle night to bright-light-of-day to gentle night in the forever continuum of the seen and unseen, and the spoken and unspoken breath of Love.
