Steve and I got back from Tuscany just two weeks ago and we’re still nostalgic for the Italian springtime. It was early in the season, so there wasn’t a lot in bloom — but the grass was that astonishing chartreuse color you only see when it’s new, and it was carpeted in the same tiny, delicate daisies Botticelli painted in his “Primavera.” With Easter just a few weeks away, shop windows were a festival of Pane di Pasqua, ricotta cheesecakes, marzipan lambs and giant foil-wrapped chocolate eggs.

Rather than write much about the trip, I thought I’d share some of it with you. We were staying at the Island of Knowledge, the small think tank tucked between vineyards and sheep pastures in the hills outside Siena. Marcelo and Kari Gleiser host week-long discussion groups there for scientists and philosophers. The people and topics are different each time, but the overall mission is the re-sacralization of the planet — in a rational, scientifically informed way. Marcelo, a physicist, opened one morning session with this Sufi-inspired, astrophysically-inflected meditation. If you can, head outside to listen and stand as we did, facing the sun.

There was a little discussion afterwards about how to calculate the number of photons hitting your hand per second. (Yes, Marcelo can do the math in his head!) And there was also a bit about neutrinos that I loved. I won’t get the details right, but the gist of it is that in the core of the sun, the process of nuclear fusion from hydrogen to helium produces a kind of particle called a neutrino. Physicists call it the “ghost particle” because it passes through everything — including us. This happens not just now and then, but every second of every day, on a scale that dwarfs the imagination.  Marcelo told us that each one of us is hit by roughly 1 trillion neutrinos per second. “So from the core of the sun to your core,” he says, “there is a bridge of neutrinos.” Imagine them passing in and through and over and around you, right now:  part of the fierce, life-giving energy of the sun. That’s a cosmic miracle we can all celebrate every day.

What an astonishing universe we get to witness. I’m glad to be here now, together with you.   

— Anne