Light again!

I am sharing something which is very very precious to me. They are a few lines that I once read in Reader's Digest many years back. I do not remember as to which section it was in - probably, Points to Ponder. Ever since then, this piece has been etched into my memory. For a few years now, I have been trying to look around in different places searching for this valuable piece. Guess what - I found it today! Thanks, Google.

Last year, somewhere on the leaves of a forgotten sugar-cane plant,

a bit of sunlight ended its eight-minute dash to earth.

Somehow, the plant turned that sunlight into sugar.

Somehow that sugar got into my morning tea.

I sipped last year's sunshine at breakfast.

Now it starts to feed these old muscles.

It's dark now, and I start for home on my bicycle.

The muscled sunlight suddenly becomes pedal-power, then chain-pull, wheel-spin,

generator-whine, filament-heat, and finally--from the headlamp--light again!

Author: Malcolm Wells, "Environmental Action Bulletin"

It is from this little piece of literature I had learnt, that it takes eight minutes for the light of Sun to reach earth.