Almost Composed

Of storms and night walking

September 20, 2015

There was a great piece in Tricycle recently, A Gleeful Foreboding, excerpted from Clark Strand’s book Waking Up To the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age. Strand describes what happened when his town near the Catskill mountains was bumped off the grid by a hurricane.

“That the larger storms sometimes turn deadly does little to chasten our feelings of anticipation. Part of it is the knowledge, gleaned from a century of experience, that things will soon go back to normal. Another is the paradox of media reports, which transform terrible events into a form of nightly entertainment while pretending to inform. In the meantime, provided no one we know has suffered harm, there’s some comfort in having nature force our hands. It feels good to release our death grip on the steering wheel, and take up the snow shovel instead.”

He talks about the relief of darkness re-entering the world: a reconnection with natural rhythms enabled by disconnecting from the on/off plugged-in culture. This got me thinking of how our technology doesn’t respect the natural cycles of the body and the planet. When you check your email before going to bed, the colour temperature of your screen is 6500k – blue light that your body interprets as midday sun. Of course, it’s not always practical to hope for a hurricane to send you back to the 1800s. To stop sleep-bothering perma-noon screens messing with your circadian rhythm, you can try a program I’ve been using for a few years now. Flux will lower the colour temperature of your display gradually as sunlight fades, decreasing its impact on your body clock.

And this talk of cycles brings me to a sort-of experiment I’m currently engaged in. Thanks again to Tricycle, I’m taking an online course looking at the Buddhist Pali canon. One of the interesting things about this course is that it’s structured around the phases of the moon. It began on the recent new moon. Tomorrow will be a waxing moon and the second batch of material will become accessible; on the full moon, the third batch; on the waning moon… you get the idea.

This lunacy has the interesting effect that when I look out of the kitchen window of an evening, I see a sliver of moon hanging above the hills and fields and think ‘oh, the next part of the course is almost here’. What may seem a ridiculous abstract conceit (I suspect my wife thinks so) feels in some ways more natural than our usual means of time-keeping. Even if it is slightly hard to tell when exactly the moon is half-way between new and full. How much more humane to adopt the lunar calendar for project management and render our deliverables up to the milestone gods when the moon is slightly fatter than half-full. I am digging it.

But back to Strand, his secret love of storms, and what I really want to say — he goes on to talk about a love of walking at night, how he clambered over trees felled by the hurricane. And how his neighbours, who knew of his nocturnal bimbling, now sought to join him on nightly walks, having no light to read by and presumably having exhausted alternatives. I share his view, having often enjoyed apocalyptic weather while looking out of an office window with the impression that, now, something was actually happening.

I also am fortunate to have had for a long time a group of friends willing to hike through woods and over hills at night – sometimes after an ale or two, or five; sometimes just because we can. There are good reasons for doing this. The world becomes unfamiliar again. You take special consideration of your surroundings – what you can see of them. Sounds are different: you hear owls hooting, scuffling in undergrowth, distant cars. The sights are different: you see stars, bats, moonlight and the shadows it casts of tree branches, and of yourselves. Conversation turns to subjects that are earthier, more fundamental to us, truer in some ways. Perhaps we talk honestly of things we would not say with sunlight on our faces when we, like the rest of the world, are shadow.

On a couple of occasions, I have mixed the excitement of a storm and a night walk. I remember walking up to Clent’s four standing stones many years ago in the middle of a rainstorm with a particularly hardy friend. As we went, we made our customary jokes about Harry-Ca-Nab, the devil’s huntsman who was said to ride over Hagley Woods and that area in a storm. It’s an example of The Wild Hunt: a mythology that appears in various places all over Europe, perhaps as a way of dramatising the uncanny wildness of night when married to the power of a storm. Perhaps also a wise warning. Awareness is sharp; the limbic system and imagination are on overtime. For me, Harry-Ca-Nab is in those woods and stalks them in every storm. As I write of it now, the images come from the same pool of imagination and memory.

In any case, we pressed on to the four standing stones at the top of the hill. From there we had a good view of the surrounding hills and the town where we lived. As we’d walked, the rainstorm had developed into fully-blown thunder and lightning (knowing us, it’s possible it was that bad when we set out) but we stood between the stones at the crest of the hill for a minute or two, half mad with the scene, I suppose. I called a friend on my new Nokia 3310, which I thought was a good trick. We counted the seconds between flash and thunderclap (far too few). Hey, this storm is pretty close, I thought — as if panoramic lightning weren’t a clue. Sanity dawned on me slowly, as it usually does, if at all, and I became dimly aware of the importance of getting the f**k down off the hill.

I wrote a song about it some months later. So here’s to storms and night walks.