Pssst! You! Yeah, you... are a passenger on a planet. On a blue-green planet that's orbiting a golden star. And if you think the holidays are coming, you're still living on a flat, motionless Earth! The holidays APPEAR to be coming. What's ACTUALLY happening is that WE are approaching a special spot in our yearly orbit around the sun. To our ancient, sky-watching ancestors this spot was holy -- as in holidays.

Several billion years ago our young, violent sun threw off a mess of debris that eventually clumped up into planets -- while huge chunks of it were colliding. Our planet got hit hard. So, we're tilted over at a 23.5 degree angle to our path around the sun. This means that our hemisphere is tilted away from the sun while we travel through the December part of our orbit, and is tilted toward the sun while we travel through the June part of our orbit. Of course, less of the sun's light means more night.

Our ancient, sky-watching ancestors recognized that night is much more than the lack of light. And it's a scientific fact that we can see farther at night than we can in the daytime. During the day our eyes feel so threatened by the sun's blinding radiation that our pupils contract. With our pupils contracted, we can't receive the fainter light from the billions of suns that are farther away than the one we're orbiting. But our pupils can feel that it's safe to open up at night.

So, the stars don't come out at night. They appear to come out at night. What's actually happening is that we're opening up to them. When we realize this, we can we can open up to them on many levels. We can see -- and we can feel -- that we are not alone in the cosmos. During the day we receive only the light of the one star that we're orbiting. At night we connect with the cosmos -- just like our ancient, sky-watching ancestors did.

Our sun's light takes 8 minutes to reach us. (By the way, light travels so fast that if you were riding around our Earth on a ray of light, you would circle our Earth 7.5 times in one second.) Since our sun's light takes 8 minutes to get here, we're always seeing our sun as it was 8 minutes earlier. But at night our pupils open up and we receive light that's been traveling longer because it's coming from farther away. The light from our North Star takes 430 years to reach us. The farthest suns we can see with our naked eyes are in the Andromeda Galaxy. This light takes 2.5 million years to reach us. So, when we're looking at it, we're peering 2.5 million years into the past. When we have 2.5 million years worth of perspective, our problems look so tiny that we can recognize them as opportunities to grow.

Our ancient ancestors who studied the night sky were called Magi. When you have the cosmic connectedness of the Magi and the perspective of the Magi during these longest nights of our year... you never know what you might see.

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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