Knowing your place, on the planet or in the solar system or within the galaxy, begins with feeling the meeting between your two human feet and the ground on which you stand. With each step, the sole of your foot once again gently touches the earth; the palpable sensations you feel there at the point of contact—and in your knees, hips, and back—is your bodily experience of the planet’s gravity holding you close, affirming (indeed insisting) that you belong to something bigger.
Where You Are, Take One: Flatland
And what do you see, walking along in your flesh-wrapped framework of elegantly-arranged bones? Why, it’s your local landscape, and more intimately, your immediate surroundings (which you also belong to!). The place you know best in all the world. The place where you see the sun rise through the trees or over the hill each morning, and where a familiar horizon—maybe open and curvaceous, perhaps enclosed by trees or buildings—surrounds and grounds the nightly glories of the starry skies.
Looking around within your immediate surroundings, from the perspective of your human body it appears that you stand in the very center of the world, and an effectively flat world at that, even when the horizon opens wide. And no matter how far you walk or drive, the world appears—to your direct perception—to be a vast horizontal expanse, albeit one with some rolling textures and a few larger ridges that, once traversed, reveal further reaches of this great flat realm. Indeed, this reality is perfectly captured on any map of your state, region, or continent.
But: you know this is an illusion of scale. The world you walk across, each footfall affirming your place as a mobile bit of this earthly body, is actually a vast terrestrial ball of rock and water, infused with life.
Where You Are, Take Two: Top of the World
Right. It’s a ball . . . if this is so, then here you are, now standing on the top of the world, the curves of this imperceptibly grand planetary sphere rolling down and away from you on all sides!
Taking a step in any direction, you move “down” the ball by a couple of feet, only to land once again at a place where the great ball still falls away all around. And so you find yourself in one of those opium-dream 1920’s cartoons, ever ambling down off the top of the world, with each forward stride spinning the earth back up under you, bopping along in place as the world turns endlessly beneath your loping legs.
Soundtrack options for your Top of the World cartoon ramble:
…Looking down on creation (rainbows and unicorns world)
I don’t worry…. (making the best of it world)
Well, as fun as this may be, perhaps it’s time to pause and reassess the situation. Ah, yes, feet meeting soil, ever pulled close in gravity’s embrace . . . drawing you directly downward, toward the very center of the Earth . . . Now your gaze rises beyond the local landscape, toward the Sun, shining through the crowns of a nearby stand of trees, here near midday in early winter . . . and you remember (re-member, once again recognize a larger truth) that it is the Sun that’s at the center of the world that the earth circles forever within.
Where You Are, Take Three: A Rocky Chunk of Starstuff
Ah, yes, gravity at play again: that selfsame center of the Earth toward which your weighty footfall is being pulled is itself the very ground of the Earth’s similarly inexorable bond to the mighty concentration of roiling plasma that sits at the heart of our solar system, its light and heat stirring Earth’s biospheric stew, its organizing forces shaping all the planets, comets, grains of dust, and incomprehensible electromagnetic fields of its expansive Solar Body. Yes: through your feet, standing in the ground of your local landscape, you can feel your—Earth’s—intimate bond with the Sun.
(Here I doff my cap to Dave Abram for his nudge toward clicking our Earthly gravitational embrace into solar scales…)
Pause for a moment and settle into this palpable connection between your body and the Earth beneath you, and the further pull of Earth’s bond with the Sun. You’re now making some initial physical connections: solidly with the Earth, and indirectly yet irrefutably with the Sun. Your sense of self, and even identity, is beginning to encompass these larger bodies. All this can resonate through that familiar feeling of standing on the dirt in your back yard.
Having embraced the Sun as the center of our larger “home,” the place where you stand now shapeshifts once again, leaving Flatworld and Top of the World behind as this wintry view of the Sun gives our rocky chunk of starstuff, and your Local Place, another subtle tweak. . . .
Where You Are, Take Four: The Tilted Earth
Look again at how the Sun rides so low across the sky, barely clearing the treetops, so different than the summer sun soaring nearly overhead. In this deeply oblique view, the tilt of our Earthly ball is vividly embodied; indeed, it’s impossible to miss. During these weeks around midwinter, we’re leaning back from the sun as far as we ever do, just as all those seasonal diagrams in our middle school science textbooks taught us.
(A detail from those images that’s timely to bring to mind: the Sun is now shining directly overhead way down along the southern tropic, in southern Brazil, northern South Africa, and across the southern tip of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.)
Indeed. You’re no longer at the top or center of the world—or, more interestingly: in addition to those “simpler” (yet valid) perspectives, you now also begin to feel the Earth deeply tilted away from the Sun. You also know full well that your Local Place (wherever it may be) is somewhere down along the bulging surface of the Earth; I’m sure you actually have a pretty decent sense of how far down the sphere you are.
It’s especially auspicious that you’re out at midday, for this is the hour when your Local Place is turned most fully toward the Sun. In these weeks around winter solstice, this midday moment occurs when when each local place in turn spins up and over the “upper side” of the leaned-back Earth, as pictured in those textbook diagrams. When the tilted planet is thus poised, fully leaning back, we get a pure and simple glimpse of the relationship between our Local Place, the tilted Earth, and the Sun, now arcing so low, far down across the rolling-away southern horizon. Here is concrete sensory confirmation of what you’ve seen on maps and globes, that you are quite far north on the tilted Earth; your Local Place is so far up and around the ball that the sun is barely in the sky. And so it is that you settle into your particular location upon the earthly body, which is beginning to come more alive in its yearly journey, right here, beneath your feet.
Where You Are, Take Five: Spinning in the Sky
But look: the sun has shifted off to the right a bit. Keep checking in as the afternoon progresses, and see if you can build on the rootedness of your feet in the soil and your body as integral to the earthly body, and begin to let the Earth turn beneath you, carrying your Local Place off to the east, away from the sun—rather than seeing the sun traveling overhead. This will take some weeks; let it come at its own pace.
In some primal and disconcerting way, this can feel like a rejection of the evidence of your own eyes, which insist (and rightly so) that the sky is moving over the unchanging solidity of the local lay of the land. But! The actual physical reality is indeed that your body, rooted to your Local Place, is always and forever rolling around the earthly ball (about a mile every five seconds!). As the hours spin by, you’re simply looking up and out—at the sun or at the stars—in different directions off the ball.
Hour by hour you ride your Local Place around the ball, now looking off the leaning-back side, soon rolling down toward the side that’s leaning forward: tonight you’ll be looking out at the stars from that leaning-forward side of the ball, where you’ll see Taurus, Orion, and Gemini high in the southern sky, out in the very direction in space where the summer sun will be traversing come June and July.
You’re now getting some initial glimpses of the movement of these bodies, of the Earth spinning (through midday and sunset) while it’s also orbiting (now in the spot of its annual journey where it’s most fully leaned back). Over time, we’ll see how both of these circular paths offer glimpses all the way around the spherical vastness of the sky, making a full rotation every day and a full circuit each year—the day a quick spin through the year’s slow turning. It’ll take some time; getting to know the full cycle of the nighttime constellations helps a lot, and watching the shifting hourly and seasonal views of the sun also brings it alive, step by step.
So start where you are: by gradually coming to feel the very trees, hills, and soil of your Local Place forever turning eastward around the body of the earth. Before long, all this will click, and for a few moments (or hours) you’ll drop out of the illusion that the sun and stars are traveling across our sky, and into the physical reality that we are turning—and circling—inside the sky. Again, while this may seem like you’re overlaying an abstract understanding onto the evidence of your senses, making this shift is a move toward the real, not toward an idea.1
Start Where You Are: All This (and More)
Each of these first few variations on “where you are” can coexist; indeed, a key to truly expanding your sense of place and of self is to see/know/feel the connections between the scales of place and bodily/physical form that our lives are unfolding within. Not just connections, but coherence, communion, coexistence: living and moving within two or more of these perspectives simultaneously. We’ll continue to add more “wheres” as this journey continues: where the earth is in its annual orbit, where we’re looking in the galaxy in the dark of each seasons nights, where your Local Place is this hour as it circles down and under and around and up on the tilted ball of the Earth.
All these material expressions of life’s inexhaustible impulse toward beauty and cohesion, solidity and transcendence, filter down in the end—or is it the beginning?—through the lens of human sensory experience, into your own bodily presence in place: your breathing body, a mobile bit of biospheric awareness bound to earth and to the sun, and joined most intimately with the particular place where you stand . . . forever turning, in ceaseless motion, looking around, and up, and out, into a vast sky that remains constant through all your days and years.
Image credit: NASA
Each additional hint of the “big picture” that is gleaned from maps, images, or deeper reading of science’s explorations and explanations (provisional as they may be) can set you down afresh in a new awareness of Where You Are. Your (direct) perceptions—eyes cast skyward and your feet planted in the ground—are being enlivened by this (abstract) knowledge of the vast ever-tilted ball of the earth circling that fiery beacon in the sky. Or perhaps: bits of science’s abstract maps and understanding are taking root, finding fuller expression through the testimony of your bodily experience.
This Solar Dance, this cultivating a sense of place in space, is a lively interplay between what we see and feel with these human bodies and useful context we’ve gleaned about physical forms and movements within the vast scales of these solar and galactic bodies. Mind and body forever in conversation, bodily perceptions filtered through unifying understanding. You will have noticed that at the transition between each of the “Where You Are” perspectives in this essay, some bit of indirect perception was introduced; in this first foray, most of these additional facts or contexts were quite obvious and universally known (though a few, like drilling down into the textbook image of the four seasons of Earth’s orbit around the Sun, highlighted details that may have slipped from your immediate awareness).
This inter-play between knowing or picturing (larger perspectives, contexts) and directly observing and experiencing creates a synergy, as what we know can inform what we’re seeing, as well as how we experience it—how it feels. At times it can pop us out of an illusory “best guess” (stars are rotating around the earth), and into seeing and feeling a deeper truth that either we can’t see directly (the earth is a big ball), or that we can’t understand just by what we see (why does the sun settle into more or less its winter solstice position by the middle of November?). But, once we add some key bit of not-quite-perceptible context, we can begin to see—and know and feel—the previously hidden fullness that is, after all, right there before our eyes.
This paradox of abstraction nourishing direct experience will continue to resonate throughout the Solar Dance journey.