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From now on, the energy is moving in electrochemical form. It is certainly different from the radiant photons of its previous moments but the driving power does not cease. It travels on, expressed once again in the electrically modulated world of atoms, but this time a world that is highly organized and able to use the energy to construct energy-bearing molecules to feed a microscopic body. The chloroplast uses those molecules to grasp carbon from the atmosphere and then make a store of glucose molecules from which energy is derived to power all of the other vital processes of being alive. Eventually, a portion of that unceasingly moving energy lands on a plate on our table and we eat it.

With our meal we grasp a part of the power carried forward from the birth of the universe, some 14 billion years ago, now burning as our Sun, and we make use of it ourselves. The energy goes on, carried inside a human frame. We have a life.

It is actually a moment that occurred tens of thousands of years ago, for it takes a long time for the radiance to reach the Sun’s surface. But then, fleeing their birthplace, the photons of light stream out into the solar system, and in just eight minutes, a very tiny quantity of them are captured by a molecule on Earth called chlorophyll. The photons are stopped dead in their tracks by the power of this molecule’s atomic resonance. When stimulated to its state of excitement, chlorophyll is at exactly the right pitch to interact with photons of red and blue energies.

In that moment too, our lives begin. In a flashing microsecond, the energy of radiance is converted into the motion of electrons in a special complex of molecules and membranes that lies waiting for just this moment inside the photosynthesizing ‘organelle’ of Earth’s plants—the chloroplast.