Reflections

November 2024

4. On light

Altered clocks. Darkness is winning now; until the winter solstice at least. Even after that, it seems a long, slow crawl up into the light again. There’s a sense of loss; of inevitability.

With every passing year it seems a little more painful; a little more arduous. Fireworks are a puny attempt to hold back the darkness with their flashes of intensity; their sparkle and noise. But now, the darkness is invited earlier and earlier, as if we have been longing to retreat into it, to close our doors and forget about the world outside. And maybe we have; although the beauty of dark nights is surely the light we then introduce into them. The bonfires, the candles, the illuminations and the glow. The dark as counterpoint to the light. Without dark, there can be no light.

Light. The light of a new morning, its possibility and promise. The light of midday in summer, with its glare and saturation. A midsummer evening, when the world seems to stand still and breathe out. As if light can be touched and held.

But even light has its dark side, it seems. It turns out that we actually need the darkness to survive. Our bodies and minds adhere to a circadian rhythm governed by the natural day and night cycle and our illuminated nights, which rely on artifical lighting, increasingly disrupt that cycle. Night-time exposure to artificial light suppresses melatonin production and much research suggests this has a negative effect on our health and wellbeing. Light pollution now seems to be one of the most pervasive forms of environmental pollution; one which has been linked to obesity, cancer, diabetes, depression, attention deficit disorder and heart disease. It disrupts the natural patterns of wildlife and contributes to the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And, of course, it obscures our view of the stars.

When an earthquake knocked out power at a Los Angeles power station in 1994, anxious residents called local emergency services to report seeing a strange, giant, silvery cloud in the dark sky. It was the Milky Way. They were seeing it for the first time, unobliterated by the urban sky glow.

There is a world of night sky out there and it can be quite astonishing to come face to face with it. I have experienced this only once: at a retreat centre in Sharpham, Devon, I was unable to sleep, so I got up and pushed back the heavy velvet curtains at the window and peered out. It was an exceptionally clear, black night and the sky was freckled in every direction with the diamond brilliance of the stars. I have never seen anything so beautiful, mysterious and awe-inspiring as that dark sky crammed with that myriad of otherness. Small points of clarity which reassure us that the light is never quite defeated.