Unwinding the Sun

Buckminster Fuller, famous architect, thinker, and man credited with inventing the geodesic dome, once made one of my favorite quotes.  “Fire is the sun unwinding from a tree’s log,” he said.

The first time I saw that quote, I closed the book I was reading so I could stop and think.

So much there to think about!

That quote came to mind when I arrived home from a trip to Helena the other day.  Across the lake from my house, on a mountainside perhaps five miles away, a prescribed burn was clawing through the forest.  A plume of smoke roiled above the fire.

Fire is a natural part of our forests.  I don’t want to say you become comfortable with seeing these plumes of smoke, but you learn to accept them when they are not created by an uncontrolled wildfire.

I stopped the truck near my solar array.  The sun stood high above me.  I could see the sheen of sunlight at work on the dark modules.  Inside each module's individual cells, photons were pushing elections through inverters and then back into my house so the electrons might unwind the sun within motors and lights.  Behind the array, in the distance, smoke from the fire ascended into the azure sky.  The sun unwinding there, too.

--Mitchell Hegman

Photo thanks to my smarter-than-me-phone