Memories and Sunlight

When I look at a tree and form a memory of it, where exactly did that memory come from? Because if you trace it back a bit, the answer gets weird fast.

A photon leaves the surface of the sun after being created in nuclear fusion deep in the solar core. 

It travels 150 million kilometers through space, a journey that takes about eight minutes. 

It hits a tree in my backyard, bounces off the leaves, travels through my cornea, gets focused by my lens, hits my retina, gets converted into electrical signals, processed by my visual cortex, and somehow becomes my memory of "that nice oak tree by the fence."

So technically, my memory of the tree born inside the sun.

That photon literally is part of my visual experience. 

Without that specific chunk of solar energy, I have no memory at all of that nice tree.

My memory of the tree is, in a very real sense, made from, or by, solar material.

That photon was forged in the sun's core through nuclear fusion about 100,000 years ago. It spent roughly 100,000 years bouncing around inside the sun before reaching the surface and beginning its eight-minute journey to my eyeball.

So when I remember that tree, it is a direct result of an event that was created in a nuclear furnace 100,000 years before humans existed, then traveled across most of the solar system to become a thought in my head.