On Solar Power

Everything lives by the light. It sounds like a religious statement. Maybe it is mine. My mother sometimes jokes that she is part plant because her personal rhythms are so affected by light cycles. It’s a truth we deny to our peril. Everything lives by the light. Trees turn colors and grow and lose their leaves based on light levels, not temperature. Horses grow and shed their winter coats based on light levels, not temperature. Chickens molt and start and stop laying eggs based on light levels, not temperature. When you live with these others, it’s a truth you also feel and you also feel out of sync in a construct that actively suppresses your in-tuneness with your surroundings. Clock time. Artificial light. Small wonder we’re perpetually exhausted when we’re working so actively against our own rhythms. 

That same mother also once accused me of being a Luddite. I acknowledge and benefit from modern technologies along with the rest of society: lightbulbs, computers, indoor plumbing, modern medicine. I’m writing this on my smart phone. But, yeah, I also really kind of want to smash them all. I feel actively wrong waking before the sun and leaving my house to go to a different building artificially lit from 9-5, 5 days a week. Somebody invented these numbers. I only acquiesce because I need money to buy food because I don’t have the resources to grow it for a full year. 

I feel actively wrong in my body under fluorescent lights. So wrong they give me migraines. I feel actively wrong body and soul sitting in a chair for seven hours a day. I recently had the opportunity to spend the day helping in the gardens at my workplace. I got thirsty and tired in the sun, but it felt right. I appreciate the income and the goals of my workplace and, as I age, I know I’ll appreciate the chair, but I can’t help but feel out of place in a corporate industrial social construct, not allowed to think my own thoughts, travel my own bunny trails, or regulate my own needs between 9 and 12 and 1 and 5. I have to save them. And then I’m too tired to remember them let alone act on them. Not because I’ve been so physically exhausted, but because I haven’t. 

Our benefits have trade-offs. I can’t help but feel that they’re a little out of balance. I, for one, could stand to photosynthesize a little more. I think I’m not so distantly related to the Pilea Peperomioides that keeps me company on my desk. Both of us would grow better, I think, living more with the sun.

I wonder about that on a grander scale, too: all of us living with the light, in sync with our natural cycles, not oppressed by the flicker ratio of fluorescent tubes. What would a society look like that traded efficiency for well-being? I can’t help but think that in that light we’d see each other better. REALLY see each other, all of the others, for what we/they are, all alike in our sun worship. Helioamorous kin.