Many years ago I was camping with a friend on BLM land in New Mexico, near Taos. We were up on a slope, miles from the nearest road and Ojo Caliente Mineral Springs; though we could see the road from our campsite. Every evening Andrew and I would go to bed to the sound of a coyote pack celebrating the ending of their day and awaken every morning to their opening salute to the not yet visible sun, as though their yelping was required to bring the sun forth.
At that time there wasn't a whole lot of traffic on this roadway, especially after the dark had set in, making it all the more dramatic when a vehicle would come into view, with it's beams of light sweeping across the darkened terrain. Light pollution, I called it then, somewhat puritanically. Now I'm not sure that I was simply being a purist in calling it that.
Light, like air and noise pollutants, is something we inflict on the others with whom we share this wonderful biosphere. Nor do we stop to measure how our fear of dark or addiction to light has impacted life here and our own participation in it.
Have you reflected on your own relationship to darkness? Are you a lover of the light to the detriment of loving the dark?
We even fear the symbolic dark, the darkness of depression and the deep inward-reaching that comes to all of us from time to time and which, to some extent, is an appropriate response to what it is we experience (consciously or not) as our home continues to deteriorate. Culturally we fear and hate this darkness, and we run to the pharmaceuticals for our relief and as our hope for salvation.
In Christianism, Christ is said to have brought the light. Buddhism considers the most heightened state of human possibility is enlightenment.
I don't want to belabor this. I just want to challenge you to reexamine your own relationship to darkness. See the cultural assumptions you do not question about this.
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