Growing up, while stargazing or watching the sun rise or set, I remember the experiences as something to behold but never having any sense of connection to them.
In other words, I never felt like I was standing on a round, spinning ball spiraling through space trapped in the gravity-well and within the coma of a helio-nucleic comet traveling through unknown stellar media. My point of view was that I was observing the stars, moon, and sun rise and set from the east to the west -- as though they were the ones moving around my position on a flat plain. Give me some credit, I grew up in West Texas where it is so flat, they'd say that if you looked hard enough at the horizon, you could see the back of your head. The best thing about being in such a flat location was we had much more sky than most other places. As a matter of fact, other than The Great Plains of the North American mid-continent, the only other places where I've seen as much sky was in Idaho, Montana, and the ocean. I'm talkin' flat!
My perspective radically changed in the mid 1990s.
By 1996, I'd left my job, my apartment, and my whole life to go find myself, as they used to say, on the road. I didn't just get in my car and take the road like some trustafarian during their summers off from some east coast university; I actually walked away from everything I'd known with only what I could carry in my (overloaded) backpack. Moreover, when I intentionally walked away from all that I knew to look for something new, I did it without a dime in my pocket and well after dark. Ultimately, my reasoning was anytime someone puts themselves into a position like I was doing, the last thing that they needed was the 'old perspectives' that led them to making the decisions that led up to them walking away from everything they'd known like I was doing.
Beginning in the summer, I hitchhiked from West Texas to Colorado and then to far upstate New York following the '96 Phish tour. In less than four months, I'd criss-crossed the US from the Rocky Mountains, over the Plains, through the Northwest Territories, back up the north side of the Appalachian Mountains to the border of Canada and then all the way back through the St. Louis Arch to Oklahoma. Then, before the end of 1996, I was spending New Years Eve with my mom in Costa Rica.
I was in Costa Rica for six months before returning to the US in March of '97. By the end of that summer, I had observed the stars from vantage points from all over Costa Rica, twelve degrees north of the equator, all the way up to the northernmost tip of Maine, north of the Forty-Fifth Parallel. Before then, I don't think I would have been able to appreciate the difference 30 degrees makes on the appearance of the stars from Earth; afterward, I would never think of it the same way.
As it turned out, there was a celestial phenomena occurring in 1997 that made my observations of the differences even more apparent. That year, the equinoxes and the solstices coincided with full moons, which also coincided with the moon's monthly perigee. So four times in 1997, the Moon was full, meaning it was positioned opposite the sun, while at its closest point to the Earth during it's monthly orbit. On the solstices, the Earth is at its closest (in December) or furthest point (June) from sun. In March, I watched the sunset and then the moon-rise from the vantage point of the eastern facing beach of the northern Nicoya Peninsula. The difference that struck me, and changed my perspective forever, was watching the sunset and moonrise from northern Maine only five months later.
From Costa Rica, at approx 12 degrees north of the Equator, I observed 1/2 of the visible sun appearing like it was 1/2 obscured by the horizon and saw 1/2 of the visible moon appearing 1/2 half obscured by the eastern horizon. However, from further north in Maine, I observed the entire setting sun appearing above the horizon to the ‘southwest’ while observing a full rising moon appearing above the horizon the ‘southeast’.
Honestly, it was an amazing, humbling sight that is burned into my rods and cones, and I’m so grateful for having witnessed it. This missive is just a shadow of the profound affect the event had on me.
Please indulge me while I try to convey what what struck me. What I was observing was not simply two round disks in the sky above me; I was suddenly struck with the realization that my vantage point was like a high ledge of the planet, and I wasn’t looking up, but rather out at these three dimensional objects.
500 Year Old Thinking: Out vs. Up
Buckminster Fuller once asked a room full of scientists if any of them had observed the sun coming up in the East and going down in the West; almost all them, responded naturally that they had. Bucky was a funny old man with a manic style of speech, as though he had so much to say, he didn’t have time to pause his banter as normal humans do. So I imagine there wasn’t much of a pause in the room after the scientists confidently raised their hands and affirmed that the sun came up in the east and goes down in the west, until Bucky silenced the room by informing them that they had just demonstrated that their thinking was over 500 years old and actually called ‘Flat-Earth Theory.’
Indeed, as Bucky would go on to explain in his own inimitable style, the sun neither goes up nor down, but rather, appears to go around from the east to the west.
What is “UP”?
If up is measured from the point of the Earth under one's feet perpendicularly towards the sky, then does that mean that Up is different depending on which side of the planet one begins measuring? If we on earth agree up is to be from the center of the earth perpendicularly through one's feet towards the sky, then what does that mean for up relative to other planets? At what point does a traveler from Earth stop going up from Earth and begin going down to Mars? Think about the language, I mean, really think about it and you too will start to understand how language is what really creates our Universe, not atoms and quarks, etc.
How do we resolve this seeming paradox? Start by thinking about jumping in place where you standing, starting from the ground and going towards the sky. Taking the latter premise, replace the idea that the direction from the center of the Earth through your feet toward the sky is OUT not UP.
Are you still with me?
Jumping ‘up’ into the air is really jumping ‘out’ from the surface of the planet. If this hasn’t confused you, then I have a better one about time coming up.
Another, more esoteric, revelation I had by observing the stars from such distant points, south to north, how the experience of time passing was different depending on how far north I went. Of course, the amount of sunlight and the shadows changed the further north I went, but more than that, there was something different about the way each hour felt as it passed. Near the equator, days and nights are almost exactly twelve hours; whereas the days are longer in the north's summer months because of the 23 degree tilt of Earth's axis.
In Costa Rica, it seemed the workday generally started much earlier than in the US and seemed to go later because there was an afternoon break time (often known in the US as “siesta”) after lunch. The Tico attitude to when it came to when now is also seemed to be different than in the US. For example, ahora in Spanish directly translates to what English speakers would call now, but in reality, the kind of now ahora could've meant includes the next few minutes, hours, or can mean the next few days when dealing with the government. Basically, ahora in San José, Costa Rica was more like the eternal Now that's both happening and going to happen.
Believe me, I saw more than one scene of US expats and tourists in San José turning red-faced after being told by someone that they’d get whatever they were dealing with sorted out ahora and then watched as their stuff was not dealt with and the someone moved on to other things.
You see, when English speakers talk about now, the word in Spanish that means the same thing is ahorita or the little now--or to be more clear in English, Right NOW.
Tip to Travelers to Latin America
By using one well placed “ahorita” in their request, tourists and expats would save themselves many hours and nerves.
Ultimately, the lesson I learned from learning the subtle difference between ahora and ahorita is that North and Central Americans not only have different language about how they differentiate which now they are talking about but they also seem to experience time differently. It seemed that living on a part of the planet which experiences fluctuating daylight hours throughout the year, people from latitudes further north really have a sense of urgency when they are moving through their day that is not shared by people living on the part of the planet with stable daylight hours.
There's More Going on Than Distance & Angle from The Sun
Hopefully by now, I've given you enough to imagine what I observed when I watched those sunsets/moon-rises. If you have, then you are ready to do a thought experiment. After shedding underlying notions that the sun goes up or down; you've begun to consciously think about the sun appearing to come from around the horizon and that the sphere we are on is spinning, which gives the sun the appearance of movement at all. Now consider this: the speed at which your latitude is spinning varies depending on how far away from the Equator you are.
Imagine the planet Earth as stack of varying sizes of vinyl records. To form a three-dimensional globe, the smallest, novelty records are on the top and bottom making the poles and 12" EP records are in the middle making the equator. In between are records between 3" and 12" stacked on top of each other to form the ball shape. Now, visualize on the sphere of records two individual points, one right on the equator on the edge of the middle 12" and the other point about halfway between the North Pole record and the Equator record directly north of the other point, at the 45 degree mark. The northern mark represents the place I was standing on in Maine in 1997.
Imagine the globe made of records is slowly spinning as they would on a turntable. Turntables have multiple speed settings, 33 1/3 revolutions per minutes (RPMs) is the typical speed for 12" records but smaller 7" disks have to be played at a faster speed, thus they are called "45s". Think about our record-globe again and consider that if a hypothetical needle were placed on the equatorial record, and the globe were spinning at the rate at which the needle played the record at the correct speed, then the same needle placed on the 45 degree record while spinning at the same speed, it would play the sound from the record at reduced speed.
For our purpose, we only need to imagine the outer edge of the records that make up the surface of our globe. The two points we made keep their relative, fixed positions as the globe spins; their marks disappearing and reappearing around the horizons. Even though the points on the two records' edges remain aligned, the record at 45 degrees has a diameter of 7", about 42% smaller than the 12" record at 0 degrees. If we were to measure the circumference around the perimeter using our points as the start and end points, we’d see that the northern point is really traveling about 22 inches verses more than 37 inches around the equatorial point's center. While two points on a globe like Ecuador and Vermont go around in positions fixed to each other, people living around the Equator are, in effect, traveling faster in 24 hours than people 45 degrees to the north or south are traveling.
What does this tell us about how different cultures positioned on different parts of the planet’s surface experience time passing?
Perhaps the explanation for why people from the northern hemisphere are being drawn to equatorial countries like Ecuador more in the last decade is because the Earth's spinning is drawing them out to the fastest moving parts in some planetary centrifugal force pulling them to the edges.
I don't know. I just know that Western Culture's outmoded mechanistic thinking is also thoroughly tainted with five hundred-year-old Flat-Earth thinking....and that is mainstream, not the relatively new "Flat-Earther" psyop that is being thrust into mainstream venues.
I think in order to unlearn the memetic pollution you've been raised with as reality, when you really take the time to actively change your language and reprogram your own wetware. Once you do, you too will begin to see from new perspectives.
Please comment below, are you feeling a pull somewhere you can’t explain?
Perhaps you are like us, and you too need to get to the Equator and feel what life and time is like where the ground is traveling at the most Extreme Speeds of anywhere on this planet. For me, time definitely passes differently here than it did in the US.
Thanks for reading! I hope you’ve enjoyed this missive as much as I’ve enjoyed thinking and writing about it.
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I toot from @WowMachineRadio on the #Fediverse about Cuenca, Ecuador, bitcoin, economics, politics, comedy, entertainment, and culture.