Until relatively recently, homo sapiens lived more in sync with the rhythms of nature. We had no other choice but to befriend the dark.
Sure, we had fires and candles to offer some light at night, but nothing compared with the artificially illuminated world we have now.
I recently read a surprisingly powerful book called: Waking Up to the Dark: The Black Madonna’s Gospel for An Age of Extinction and Collapse, by Clark Strand.
The book almost literally jumped off the library shelf towards me. As someone who has been inexplicably compelled to spend time in places with dark skies (Sedona, Hatteras Island, the woods of Northern Maine), I knew I had to read it.
Spending time in these places is about more than enjoying the beauty of the stars, although there is that. There is something more spiritual, deep and primal. This book, as the best ones do, helped explain me to myself and helped me understand humanity better.
As a former Zen Buddhist monk, Strand knows about stillness and embracing the dark. As our society races into the end of December with the typical frenzy, I am struck by how far away we are from our roots.
On this winter solstice, the darkest day of 2023 in the northern hemisphere, I wanted to share with you some wisdom from this book (although I highly recommend reading the book in its entirety).
“Turn out the lights and leave them off-and we will experience a consciousness our minds have never known but our bodies still remember. Leave them on and it scarcely matters what else we do or leave undone. We will not significantly alter our path through time. Nor will we alter the path of our species, which has taken a collective detour leading nowhere but oblivion and extinction. We persist perpetually in making this seem more complicated than it is.
What is it we have forgotten as a species that allows us to wreck the planet? People look everywhere for the answers to this question except for the place where it is to be found. We are like the drunk searching for his car keys under the streetlamp because the light is better there. We can’t find our souls in the daylight since we lost them in the dark.
Turn off the lights and leave them off, and after a few weeks you will discover something miraculous. When the sun goes down, your mind will grow quiet. All the things that were supposed to be important-the things you fretted over, the ones that kept you up at night making you feel trapped, faced with impossible trade-offs-all these fade as though the plug has been pulled on them. In fact, the plug has been pulled.
Claim your place in the dark and the body takes over, solving problems the mind could not, making all things simple that are complicated by the light. The bad choice. The false ambition. The things society would compel us to value which, absent the thousand-watt voltage of an artificially illuminated world, are revealed for the destructive illusions they really are. Turn off the lights, and leave them off and, in short, you remember who you are.
Would you like me to provide an argument in favor of all of this in order to convince you? Should I acknowledge the wondrous advances of human reason, the medical milestones, the household conveniences, and the steady march of progress, all of which are surely lost in the dark? I will not make that argument or concede those points. There is no argument you will listen to that will embolden you to drop this super-lit illusion of modern life. You have to come to the decision on your own.
There are those who seek to drag me into the light, make me stand and deliver and defend myself. But this I will not do. There is no reason for it. The stars are my argument. My witness is the moon. Remain plugged in if you wish, but when the darkness comes-your death and the decline of our species-don’t complain that you can’t see by it. Don’t say, The world has gone dark and now I am as one made blind.’
The time has come to rethink our relationship with darkness and all that it portends.
Because secretly we all know it is coming-the cataclysmic event that will change our world. Mostly we feel powerless to avoid it.
That is the starting point-to know that our current way of life has no future. We are like the addict who can’t recover before he hits rock bottom. Only when he has fallen as far down as he can go does he find the wherewithal to stand on his own two feet again and begin to look around.
We have become addicted to artificial light. In the beginning the addiction was a mild one. Now it is entering its final stage as human beings the world over anxiously wait to hit bottom.
We are addicted to light and all that it symbolizes-certainty, the supremacy of our own power and knowledge, even the belief that all things can be “made clear.” Progress. Power. Perfection. Destiny. We’ve gotta have ‘em. Even if it destroys our world.
The evidence of this life-destroying addiction is everywhere. Sadly, it’s impossible for most of us to see. We have nothing to compare it to.
To witness its full scope requires a journey into space. There, at last, we would be able to see it whole. For there is one thing about Earth that is obvious from the upper atmosphere-provided you make the journey at night-and that is the preponderance of unnatural light.
For a million years our ancestors followed a pattern of daily life ruled almost entirely by the rising and falling of the sun. Activity began before daybreak, and persisted for a little while after dark. Fire was the only light. The nights were long but hardly vacant. Babies would nurse. The fire would be tended. And later, stories might be acted out or told. If it was cold, everyone would snuggle. Couples would make love. Everyone, without exception, woke to wonders during the night. These were the holy hours-the hours of dreams and visions that would later inform the sacred texts of the world.
We believe the modern world rests on a petroleum platform, but really it rests on light. Petroleum drives our cars, light drives our consciousness. And what it drives us to is mostly excess-in all its myriad forms.
Every organized religion created after the dawn of agriculture placed a premium on human destiny. Thus, every organized religion in the world today, with the exception of those rare outliers among indigenous people, was created to answer a question the very asking of which betrays a bias so vast we can scarcely see around it: What is the meaning of human life?
Put simply, all religion is anthropocentric. Religion is the product of an age stretching back some 10,000 years that, provided we are able to evolve beyond it, may be known to some future species of ourselves as the Anthropocene- an era when homo sapiens dominated the planet, harnessing its energies for their sole purpose and appropriating its natural resources exclusively for human use.
Waking up to the dark is a way of reaching around the Anthropocene to catch glimpses of what might have existed before it-a time when it was still possible to recognize a human being as part of the landscape of the world, before it became what it now is: a dazzling figure against the ground of nature with such an overwhelming sense of its own destiny that the ground it sprang from is virtually invisible to it now. It is as if it had no backdrop, no context, and no home. As if it were a thing unto itself, glorious, self-determined, and alone.
It isn’t just religion that champions the psychotic indifference of our species to nature-as if our life and the planet were not one. Those archeologists and evolutionary biologists who challenge the Bible’s account of creation rarely challenge with any real enthusiasm the anthropocentric worldview for which the Bible’s creation story serves as the founding narrative. They are as much believers as the creationists are. Genesis has nothing to do with light and darkness, or man and woman, or 7 days as opposed to 7 million years. What is being created is the sense of a human destiny separate and distinct from this world.
Any culture that takes Genesis as its founding story can only have developed as ours has. The bible is a thought experiment that shows us what becomes of a species that defines itself apart from nature, imagining a future for itself that is separate from the world’s. At the end of the Bible, humans must imagine ‘a new heaven and a new earth.’ What has become of the heaven and earth they had before? They destroyed them.
Today the same narrative gets played out by futurists and science fiction authors who imagine that it is possible for human beings to migrate to other planets when this one becomes overpopulated or destroyed. But this is fantasy because even if humans were capable of escaping to other planets, they could not survive there without their ancestors and their Mother. Evolution hasn’t prepared them for it. We can’t stray far from these vast closed chains of plant and animal life of which we are an integral part.
We belong to this planet, not to another. Its sunlight is imprinted on our cells. The dirt under our fingernails is our dirt-the Mother we came from, and the Mother to whom we return.”
All of this is, in part, why you will find my house to always be the darkest one on the block at night-not as an act of grumpiness or renunciation, but as an act of love and remembrance of who we really are. As an act of humility and generosity to the non-human hearts which also belong to this earth.
When I go out in the dark of the night, wherever I am, it’s not unusual to find others taking refuge- owls hooting, deer or coyotes curled up resting their tired bones, even bobcats tending to their babies. Being in a community of diverse beings makes my heart sing. We co-evolved together as earthlings and it’s important for all of us to be here together.
Artificial outdoor lighting is one more stressor for them in a world of stressors created by us humans. Sometimes not doing something can be the biggest act of love.
So, on this darkest day of the year, let’s not just celebrate the return of the light. Let us not miss the gifts of the dark. Let’s ask how we ourselves can be a gift to others by embracing the dark.
May all of us learn to be the peace we want to see in the world, by being willing to examine the consequences of our actions and let love guide our way forward.
Not just a close-in love for our own favorite beings, but for each and every being on earth, without exception.
Wishing blessings to you and to all,
Erin
