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 part of our yearly orbit that people call, "the dog days of summer." But... WHO is the dog? And what does he have to do with hot weather?

The dog, as it turns out, is the Dog Star, in the constellation Canis Major, one of the few constellations that actually looks like its name: a Big Dog. This is the brightest star in the constellation - and it's the brightest star in all of our night sky. It's called Sirius, and it means "scorching." It's the namesake of Harry Potter's godfather, Sirius Black. And Sirius Black, as you may know, can manifest himself as a dog.

Imagine our little planet orbiting the sun. Imagine our little planet surrounded by billions of other suns so far away that they appear to us as twinkling little stars. Some of these stars are blocked from our view because they're behind the sun. But they don't stay behind it because we don't stay still. As we orbit, certain stars pass behind the sun from our perspective, and certain other stars re-appear from behind the sun. Sirius is behind the sun in our summer. When it re-appears, it's visible very close to the sun very briefly before the sun rises.

In ancient Egypt this Dog Star always re-appeared just before the annual flooding of the Nile, generated by rainstorms upstream. Without this flooding, Egypt's soil was dry and lacking in the nutrients to feed her people. So, the Dog Star's re-appearance gave people hope. Naturally, these Dog Days are hot because this is, after all, summer. But long ago folks didn't understand why summer is hot. They figured that the heat was because the Dog Star was so close to the sun, in cahoots with it, adding its scorching rays to the sun's heat: "the dog days of summer."

Now we know that our earth is tilted. When our hemisphere is pointed toward the sun, we're bathed in its radiation: summertime. The sun is called Sol in Latin, and Sol is the heart of our solar system - it's the star of our show. Your heart and the area around it is called your solar plexus. And your solar plexus is like the sun that's inside you. It's the power that makes your heart beat, and it's the warm, sunny, heart-felt radiance that allows you to light up the world with your smile and shine like a star. This inner sun of yours knows something that's vital to your dignity, something that the sun up in the sky knows: I am not shining because the planets are out there applauding - or because they might applaud if I please them. I AM SHINING BECAUSE I AM A BALL OF FIRE.

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


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