Sun Worship

Waikiki Beach 1979. Nothing much changes.


There are people who enjoy being out in the sun and then there are people who lie in the sun and bake their bodies to a lobster red or a golden brown, depending on the chemicals used or the lack thereof. These people are called Sun Worshipers. I would be the former. I do lie in the sun when we vacation in a tropical paradise in the dead of winter, but there comes a point when I can no longer take the heat and I head for shade or a swimming pool. I tan easily and am not afraid of the UV, but it is the build-up of heat that makes me very uncomfortable. I will feel this way in the shade on a very hot day also.
I lay in the sun, deliberately, today (June 23) for an hour. The air was cool and the sun warm and the shade was only a few feet away, a retreat for when the panic sets in. I was thinking of all the deliberate UV that is absorbed on the planet everyday. If a nuclear explosion was announced and scheduled, how many of us would strip down, put on the lotion, and expose ourselves to the rays, hoping to get a tan. Probably fewer than none. And yet, the sun is a cauldron of nuclear reactions and explosions emitting a constant barrage of radiation that is deadly. We say the atmosphere protects us, but this protection is only partial. The way the sun's radiation interacts with the ozone layer and with our magnetic field is complex and if tweaked one way or the other, we would all be fried to a crisp. The universe, our earth, and all of life is full of irreducible complexities which I will describe in the next post. Hey, it is too bright to read in the sun so I think about these things to pass the time while my honed Greek body is being bronzed by the sun.