Waking Up to the Dark Quotes

“We have demonized the dark along with half of what is good within us, and half of the human race besides.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“In the dark, every voice could be the voice of an ancestor or a spirit guide. In the darkness, who can tell the living from the dead?”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Perhaps what those who meditate today are seeking is a state that our ancestors would have considered their birthright, a nightly occurrence.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“In all likelihood, we will not have oil one hundred years from now. Realistically, the world’s easily obtainable petroleum will be gone much sooner than that—by mid-century at the latest. There will be nothing of comparable versatility to replace it. As hard as that will be, good riddance. Fueling the light-driven engine of corporate capitalism, petroleum has swollen the human population and destroyed our communities, our atmosphere, and our world. Good riddance, I say, even if I die. I will die anyway. Everything does. The petroleum bubble briefly allowed us to live in denial of that most fundamental of all fundamental facts: that all things return to their Mother.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“A man I barely knew told me, “When the grid goes down, the mythical creatures return.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Put simply, all religion is anthropocentric.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Every organized religion created after the dawn of agriculture placed a premium on human destiny. Thus, every religion in the world today, with the exception of those rare outliers among indigenous peoples, 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?”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Every plant and animal cell on the planet is the result of an unbroken biological lineage going back to the beginning of all life. And even that beginning had another beginning. The Earth, the Sun, the Moon: all have ancestors. Even our universe—the mother of a hundred billion galaxies—must surely have had a mother and father of her own.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Everything walks—leaves, stones, rivers. Nothing is still.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“The houses that trouble me most are the ones with a lamp on all night and people living inside. I don’t look at those lamps and think what a waste of electricity or money they are. It’s another waste I see. For every watt that shines in the darkness, I see restless sleepers drifting further and further from their souls.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“And the lights are everywhere. They are so pervasive in modern life we’ve stopped seeing them. In turning them off, it’s hard to know where to begin. There are house lights and garage lights, fluorescent lights and halogen lights. There are streetlights and stoplights, headlights, taillights, dashboard lights, and billboard lights. There are night-lights to stand sentinel against the dark of our rooms and hallways, and reading lights for feeding our addiction to words and images and information, even in the middle of the night. There are warning lights and safety lights, and the lights of our cell phones and televisions and computer screens. No wonder our larger towns and cities are so bright you can see them from space. Nor does that urban and suburban light stay put. It seeps into the nearby plains and hills and mountains, casting shadows from trees and telephone poles. It throws off the rhythms of insects and animals and confuses the migrations of birds.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“The point of life has little to do with the getting and spending that occupies the greater portion of our days. If we want to know the value of life—the real value, not the monetary or social value—we have to wake up in the middle of the night and see what is happening in the dark. Are there dreams and visions? Are there symbols and signs? Is the night palpable with hopes and longings, pregnant with intimations and desires? Can we hear the peepers in the woods? The quiet of the snowfall? The rise and fall of someone’s breath? Or is our impulse to turn on the lights, watch television, or medicate ourselves back into unconsciousness?”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“We don’t know the value of darkness until we have destroyed it.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“will collapse and temperatures will rise—and then the waters will. Global agricultural production will level off and then fall. What food remains will be local and not enough. And all these things will come to pass while people continue to argue about them. Until there is no more argument, because there is no more doubt.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“inconceivable.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“It wasn’t obvious that repurposing every aspect of the planet for our own benefit wasn’t really to our benefit at all.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Few of us know how saturated our minds and bodies are with light. Even fewer realize how profoundly modern media poisons the soul.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Another is the paradox of media reports, which transform terrible events into a form of nightly entertainment while pretending to inform.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“And yet how surprised we are to find ourselves faced today with widespread pollution, overpopulation, and global warming. The only surprise is that we find this surprising. Still, until very recently, we could probably have avoided the worst of it. Because in the late nineteenth century something happened that greatly accelerated our decline. Conservative social critics have sometimes lamented the loss of a religious consciousness in the age of TV, Twitter, and the Internet. But they are coming into the argument far too late in the game. That loss was already inevitable once the incandescent light bulb came into common use. That was the real tipping point that would eventually guarantee the excesses of the twentieth century—from world wars to climate change to the widespread pollution of rivers, lakes, and streams. For all these spring directly from the overflow of human consciousness, for which the flood of light is both the metaphor and the means.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“What we do to our bodies with antibiotics, we do to consciousness with light.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“We all carry the question in the deepest part of our being. We turn on the lights, power up our brains, and fill every crack and crevice with illumination and distraction. But in what shadows remain, there is still that question, waiting for us. Death is waiting for us. Paradoxically, the less space we allot to it, the larger it grows. Perhaps that is why so many of us fear the dark.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Yet in my rural town I almost never run into anyone on my nightly walks—except for one eccentric, a man everyone calls Jogger John.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“In popular idiom, that waking period between dark and daybreak is called the “Hour of the Wolf,” an image evoking the eerie, predatory fatalism that tends to come calling in the small hours of the night. It is believed to be the hour when most people die and when the nightmares we wake from are likeliest to seem real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by secret fears—when the ghosts and demons they scarecely believe in by daylight suddenly come to life. Supposedly, it is also the hour when most babies are born.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Inside the dark we are unprotected, and our troubles always come close.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age