I discovered something amazing this summer: tomatoes.
I don’t have a garden, but a friend sent me home with a selection from his first crop. They were heirlooms, colorful and variegated, tasting of tart, tomatoey sunshine. That day I ate one enormous tomato for lunch.
In earlier times, fruits and vegetables were understood to partake of celestial influences. Tomatoes were related to Venus—the French called them pommes d’amour, “love apples”—and to the sun.
We have learned to think of those old correspondences of interconnectedness between earthly life and celestial bodies as quaint and superstitious. They may be interesting poetically, we think, but we know better.
Most mornings I get up in time to look at the sun for a few minutes as it bursts over the horizon. I try to really see the sun, not only my idea of it. The more I look, the more I have a sense of mystery and gratitude.
It’s like the image given in Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions in which a sphere passes through a plane. The flatlanders who live on the plane see only the sphere’s curved outline, not its whole body.
Beholding the sun’s splendor, I feel as though I likewise see only an outline. It is as though the sun were an awesome and supernatural being existing in another dimension and another scale of time.
This impression may sound romantic compared with what we learned about the sun in school, yet it has greater reality and relevance to my life. To experience the sun as something unfathomable and intelligent arouses reverence and awe. That awe contains more possibilities than the image of a fusion furnace, a campfire floating in empty space.
All life strives toward the sun. Plants are forever reaching, yearning to receive its influence. Trees stretch skyward, spreading their leaves to catch its light. In turn, the sun gives its whole force to the Earth.
There is a relationship between the sun and the Earth that verges on the erotic. In that union, the fecundity of life abounds. Everything that lives is born from the coupling of the sun and the Earth, including humanity.
Life is born and maintained through this unceasing exchange of cosmic substances. It stands to reason that, on another scale, the sun too receives what comes from above and transmits it below. What is the sun for the sun?
At the core of the Hermetic tradition is the formulation, “That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.” It echoes the biblical suggestion that the human being is made in the image of the whole.
In this view of worlds nested within worlds, the cosmic interplay of active and receptive forces is mirrored in the microcosm of myself. What is the sun in my own nature? What is the Earth? And how may I enable that generative union of forces to unfold in me?
Is it a coincidence that the seat of emotion and feeling is the solar plexus? When I bring my attention to that region of concentrated nerve ganglia below the center of my chest, I find something like radiance. Keeping attention there, a warmth of feeling grows and spreads into my belly and chest, and even my limbs.
I am my heart, or the solar plexus, radiating feeling. And I am also my sensing body, receiving warmth. I (the sun) feel myself (the Earth).
Eating, my body digests the tomato. In a feat of alchemy, part of it involves and gets pooped. At the same time the body extracts the force of the tomato—the love apple—and transforms it upward into vitality, sensitivity, consciousness, creativity, and love.
I am faced with a dual mystery—the cosmos and myself—and realize I don’t know what anything is. Both transform matter and energy up and down like ingenious, living instruments of transformation.
I am helpless in the face of this mystery. I don’t know, and I wish to know. But this is not an intellectual exercise. To make this study I have to open a channel between my inner and outer life. So I strive to eat the tomato when I eat the tomato; to look at the sun when I look at the sun; to receive and return the smile offered by a stranger on the street.
