It takes just over eight minutes for light from the sun to travel the ninety three million miles to the earth. This energy, combined with carbon dioxide is how plants make sugar and oxygen through photosynthesis. This happens constantly.

This means that it happened back in June when my wife was harvesting the strawberries in the yard. It’s an odd thought to have but true just the same. When we harvest plant food, we are harvesting energy from the sun. Strawberries are sugar batteries.

I love sweetness. I crave it, live for it really. We have a yard for gathering sweetness. We have peach, apple, plum and cherry trees. There are berry bushes everywhere. In addition to collecting sweetness, our kitchen is set up for preserving it. Best of all, I have a tongue for its enjoyment.

It’s an odd thing, that the irrational experience of pleasure comes indirectly from the sun. According to the Greeks, Apollo was the god of the sun and the god of reason. In my life, I’ve never met a reasonable pie. There must be other forces at work.

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Is there a reason for sweetness? Is there a reason for pleasure? Dionysus what have you done? Does the light of truth and reason have a flavor, a deliciousness to it?

The sun’s sweet energy travels far and arrives here quite quickly. Dionysus stores it in berry batteries. We preserve it in jars as jam and jellies. I recently ate a jar of jam we made in June of 2020. My delicious toast was stale sunshine? Perhaps

We are surrounded by sweetness and bathed in light. We all can hold on to sweetness.

So here’s an experiment. Go buy some fruit, enough to make jam. To minimize costs, buy some from the almost rotten / day old rack in the grocery store. Better yet, go to a farm market and buy some from a farmer.

Make jam. Use google. It will tell you something to make with the fruit you’ve found.

Then, on a day that things seem unreasonable, irrational and mean, go to your cupboard. Open up the sweetness you saved.

We all crave sweetness. Whether from the sun or each other, when we hold on to the sweetness of the world, we’re holding onto something powered by the light of reason and truth. Better yet, the sweetness fuels us.

So.

Go collect some sweetness. In a few months when things seem bleak, you’ll thank yourself.

Also, if you don’t have time to make jam, what other sweetness have you encountered lately? How can you preserve it to help you make life more delicious later?