Pssst! You! Yeah, you... are a passenger on a planet... on a blue-green planet that's orbiting a golden star. And right now we are traveling through a point in our yearly orbit that reminds me of an earthquake that knocked me to the ground in Peru in 1986. Until Spaniards invaded Peru in 1533, its Inca Empire enjoyed prosperity, technological sophistication and splendor beyond anything ever seen in Europe. In spite of this, European invaders deemed the Inca primitive and superstitious sun-worshippers.

You and I can fry in the sun's presence and we can freeze in its absence. So, if we don't figure out the sun's annual cycle and learn to live by it, we end up on the list of extinct species. You can see this cycle yourself. The sun always sets in the west, but it doesn't always set in the same spot. This shifting is because our planet is tilted to her yearly orbit around the sun. When sunset is as far north as it ever gets, we in the northern hemisphere receive maximum sunlight, and we call this the summer solstice.

After I recovered from the earthquake, I found the people in Cuzco (capital of the Inca Empire) celebrating in the streets. Their Roman Catholic cathedral had just collapsed. Underneath it stood the Coricancha, the Inca observatory, which had once monitored our planet's relationship with the sky. This observatory employed 4,000 people and was the center of an empire so perfectly synchronized with the seasonal rhythms of earth and sky that a family satisfied its needs by farming only 65 days a year.

A few days after the earthquake I visited Machu Picchu. Here, at the carved stone "Hitching Post of the Sun," the Inca celebrated the solstices. Here they watched the sun's cycle, they grasped it, they hitched it in their minds. Even though most of their land was steep, rocky and dry, they hitched their activities to this cycle with such efficiency that they enjoyed a 3-to-7 year food surplus. So, I ask you: Were the Inca really superstitious sun worshippers? Or were they revering the richness of life that's possible when you live in harmony with the sun's cycle?

According to Westerners, the Inca were so superstitious as to believe that their Hitching Post prevented the sun from straying too far in winter and from coming too close in summer. However, my guide was calling this Hitching Post a technology. "A technology?" I asked myself. "How can it be a technology when it has no moving parts and no power source?"

In the aftermath of the earthquake, I started to see things differently. I began to question the people who tell us that progress requires more complicated engineering and more fuel-consumption. These people cannot recognize a technology that's simple, silent and clean. I began to see that the simple, silent, stone Hitching Post of the Sun needs no fuel or moving parts because our moving Planet Earth provides all of the necessary motion.

This is Harriet Witt, your guide for this little ride on our passenger planet.


If you have any questions, drop Harriet an email: harriet@passengerplanet.com


return to home page