Waking Up to the Dark

February 1, 2015
A celebration of the life-enriching-indeed, indispensable-properties of the night.Strand (Waking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion, 2014, etc.) delivers a significant amount of experiential melding to existential thoughtfulness in this book about the sublime and elemental powers of the dark. Not the dark of cellars and closets but rather night, with "its monochrome wonders, its velvety silences and distant muffled sounds." The author expresses his distress over how we often ignore the splendor of the night, and he looks at his personal experiences with the dark, from early youth to today-especially the two hours of sleepy wakefulness between three or four hours of sleep on either side. For many, these can be fretful hours. The author, however, cherishes the vulnerability as a letting go, a transcendence to the divine, however one chooses to understand that state. Strand is passionate about the subject, displaying a blunt, fervent honesty. The advent of electricity damaged our relationship with the dark (allowing for an overflow of consciousness), writes the author, though various religious teachings had already made a significant dent-e.g., encouraging the elevation of humans above all else, inevitably leading to the abuse of the planet. The author pushes for a re-enchantment with the night, which for him means getting up, going for a walk where it is dark-as Strand suggests the ancients did-and seeing if the dark can open a numinous space in both head and heart. Throughout, the author gives a stark voice to fundamentals: "Simplicity is always the answer"; "The problem we face today is a crisis of values." In working with those fundamentals, he finds an embracing comfort. "In the dark we recover our simplicity, our happiness, and our relatedness," he writes, "because in the dark we remember our souls." An exigent, affecting summons to rediscover the night.

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October 3, 2022
Tricycle columnist Strand (The Way of the Rose) delivers an incoherent paean to darkness. “We don’t know the value of darkness until we have destroyed it,” Strand contends, stringing together musings on Christianity, Buddhism, paganism, and science to argue for the merits of nighttime. He decries light pollution and details a study that found participants shielded from sources of light while sleeping would wake in a meditative state for a couple hours during the night before falling back asleep, suggesting humans were not meant to doze straight through the night. However, his assertions more frequently forgo supporting evidence, as when he posits that people who leave outdoor lamps on overnight have worse sex (“Sex belongs to the darkness, not the light”). Readers will struggle to follow his convoluted logic, particularly in the chapter about his spiritual encounters with an apparition-like figure he calls the “Black Madonna,” in which he zooms from stories of Hindu goddesses to depictions of mother Mary to pondering the climate apocalypse, concluding that “life is close.” Riddled with prose that borders on nonsense (“Apart from the grave, footsteps are the body’s most honest answer to the question of gravity”), this is good for inducing sleep, but not much else.