Sometimes, I look at things like this and think about the cliches associated with them and how people in a less wired world experienced them. The intensity of the white/silver line around the cloud must have surely generated more than one myth to explain it.
And, of course, we know it's simply the sun behind some rain clouds.
Which got me to wondering about the sun, mostly how long it's been shining, how much longer it will shine. So off to the Google.
NASA tells me that our best estimate is that the sun is about 4, 500,000,000 years old. Let me spell that out for you. That's four billion, five hundred million years. Also 4.5 billion. These are no exact numbers.
NASA also tells me that our sun has about 5,000,000,000 more years to go. Which is long enough to count as "forever" for our immediate purposes.
I feel the pull into something trite. I'm not interested in easy metaphors.
What I'm circling around with these facts and figures and images is that there's a lot of history and a lot of future and we're only around for a blip of it. In our brief blip of a life, we see death and sorrow and pain but we also bump into life and joy and pleasure.
In my worst moments, I wonder about the purpose of it all, if there is a purpose to it all, and how can my brief blip of a life matter in a cosmos where a sun that has burned for 4.5 billion years and still has, likely, another 5 billion to go?
Then I'm surprised by beauty, by awe, by pleasure.
If this isn't resurrection, it's close enough for today.
Alleluia.
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