No Show This Week; Thoughts On Darkness

The same guest rescheduled at the last minute for the second week running, so there’s no interview transcript today.

It’s the time of the year when the bones of life are visible. The trees are bare, the land unadorned by flora while fauna are hunkered down in dens or sheltered spots. The local deer have headed to south-facing bowers, and there’s still no sign of our old friend Sputnik, though his mate and two yearling offspring have appeared in the yard twice in hte last week. Here he is in healthier days.

I was on the road this week, spending evenings in Tacoma and Seattle, then on the road home on Thursday night, when the gathering darkness of Southern Oregon unveiled the flood of stars invisible in the city skies. During the 31 years in Tacoma, I forgot the depth of the night sky because light pollution gives an urban stargazer the impression that in addition to the Big Dipper, there are less than a dozen stars above us.

On Thursday night as I was driving home about 30 miles south of Eugene, where I-5 rolls into the mountains, the night bloomed with thousands of points of light and I was reminded of the glory our anscestors painted with meaning. Cassiopeia pivots the Noth Star opposite the Big Dipper; Orion hunts Taurus; in recent weeks, Jupiter’s been sitting squarely in Gemini. Back home on Saturday night, when a blackout extinguished the only two lights visible from our place, I stood in the yard, head tipped back to gaze at the Milky Way. It is amazing and humbling; we could use more of the humility that a dark night delivers.

The area around Crater Lake is one of the nation’s darkest places.

Our predecessors did not think of themselves as alone but placed amid a panoply of meaning that animated fireside conversation and the education of the youth. The patterns and rhythms of the night were not as frightening as moderns think. Night provided meaning and the stars counted the seasons, wrapping unknown sounds in familiar stories of trials and victories that linked various gods and animal spirits to the human standing at the edge of a settlement and wondering “What is out there?” We had stories that made the mysterious comfortable, even when accompanied by fear.

After all, Orion wasn’t just hunting, he was chasing the seven sisters of the Pleiades when he wasn’t spending nights with Artemis or various nymphs. In pre-colonial America, the same stars hunted in the legends of the Lakota, Ojibwe, and Chumash.

In the 21st Century, we don’t look at the stars as the setting for our existence or a map of our myths. Video streams, posts appear, gifs wiggle, and we endure a constant stream of news delivered as pixels of light that replace the skies as our reference point. Most of today’s light delivers distraction, washing out meaning and contributing more to fear than confidence. Since the dawn of social platforms and insurgent news sources, our media has been flooded with fears, false crises, and grievance that fill our thoughts with a malign night full of threats manufactured by the purveyors of so-called light. It has made us fearful, encouraged retribution more than understanding, and ignited the tinder of civil war.

Get out into the night, look up, and soak up the beauty of night. There’s nothing to be afraid of when we proceed from a thoughtful appreciation for nature, one another, and the deep night sky.

There’s a butte just three quarters of a mile from our place that has no name on maps, but locals call it Bear Rock. There’s a purported bear den beneath the basaltic outcropping seen in this photo of Elk Creek yesterday morning. The hoarfost along the banks looks like snow, however we haven’t had any precipitation for almost a month and the creek is running well below normal at this time of year.

I’ll see you all next week with a new interview transcript—we’ve got two recording sessions scheduled.