XIX · The Sun

The Sun is home. We are all ultimately citizens of the Earth, and the Earth is a creature of the Sun. How often is this simple fact forgotten? The pale blue dot, Gaia, our home and everything we love, lives on light that falls on it for free. When you get this card, remember your home. That is what is important. What would you do to protect it?

On the Sun card a naked child rides a white horse under a huge, smiling sun, waving a red banner, with sunflowers along the wall behind. It's the happiest card in the deck. Everything is out in the open, warm, and simple. Nothing hides. That, in this deck, is the problem.

In the salt pans of southern Europe, where flamingos feed, the water is full of brine shrimp, and some of them carry the larvae of a tapeworm, Flamingolepis liguloides. The worm can grow up only inside a flamingo. Infected shrimp tend to be redder, loaded with carotenoids, the same pigments that make carrots orange, and they tend to gather in swarms near the surface, in the light. To a flamingo, they are a brighter mouthful in a pinker crowd. (Plenty of healthy shrimp swarm and blush too, so don't blame every red shrimp on a worm.)

Flamingos, as everyone knows, are pink because of what they eat. Carotenoids from algae and shrimp end up in their feathers. So the flamingo's famous color is, in part, a portrait of its meals, and some of those meals were painted red and sent up into the sun by a worm that was trying to get eaten.

Here's the riddle. In Plato's cave, prisoners chained in the dark watch shadows on a wall. One of them is freed, climbs up into the sunlight, and sees things as they really are. When he goes back down to tell the others, they want to kill him. The brine shrimp gets the shorter version: it rises into the light, turns a brilliant color, and is eaten before it can tell anyone. The Sun is truth and joy, and both have this in common: they make you visible.

That's the card's dark side, and it's a sunny one. Joy is real, and this card is the best news in the deck. But joy makes you conspicuous. The moment you're happiest, brightest, most yourself, is the moment you're easiest to see from above. The worm knows this and uses it. You can use it too, if you know who's watching.

When the Sun appears, enjoy it, really. Then ask what's made you glow lately. Is the color yours? And when you rise toward the surface to celebrate, take a glance up for long pink legs.