I’ve never, ever been this far away from home, and now I know
It gets dark, yeah, it gets dark and I
I’m moving at the speed of light, I have to go
But now I know, it gets dark so I can see the stars
- Sigrid, It Gets Dark
A few weeks ago, we journeyed a few hours Southwest from Colorado Springs to visit Great Dunes National Park. It is a strange and beautiful place, where the largest sand dunes in North America formed out of 1.2 cubic miles of sand left behind from a vast prehistoric lake in the San Luis Valley, nestled between the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan mountain ranges. Here is a photo I took of the dunes rising against the mountains with bonus autumn trees hamming it up on the sidelines:
Great Dunes is one of the best dark sky locations we’ve experienced in the continental United States. Pinion Flats Campground is right inside the park, which is why this is the only place I’ve ever attempted astrophotography. I can walk from our campsite to a field after dark and spend upwards of an hour in the cold fiddling with focus, ISO, aperture, and shutter speed.
Taking pictures of stars is a strange exercise in the age of digital cameras. I’ve grown accustomed to knowing how a photo might turn out before I take it. Astrophotography is a lot more trial and error, full of long pauses as I wait for the 20-30 second exposure to show me just how far off my settings are. Finding focus is a weird process- using the live display to find the brightest star you can, zooming way in with digital (not optical) zoom and fiddling with manual focus until it’s as unblurry as possible. Then you pick a composition, guess an exposure length and aperture size, hit the shutter release and wait. In the course of an hour and a half, I ended up with like 30 shots, most of which were garbage.
Here is my favorite capture from the recent trip to the dunes:
And here’s a bonus capture from last year’s camping trip. This one reminds me of the menu screen from one of my favorite games (if you can guess the game then we are automatically friends).
I only became aware of the disappearing night sky in adulthood. Though I grew up among trees and mountains in California, light pollution from cities like San Jose, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco radiates up and down the Pacific coast, making it at present a 4-hour drive from my hometown to the nearest properly dark sky (Yosemite). I thought I remembered skies being darker when I was a child. Research has indicated that between 2011 and 2022, skies brightened by an estimated 9.6% per year.
This is a dark sky map of Colorado from Light Pollution Map. Light from Denver and Colorado Springs clearly dominates much of the state. There are only a few pockets that offer a relatively unencumbered view of the stars.
The implications of an ever-brightening globe are more than merely metaphorical or aesthetic. The phenomenon is enabled by ever-increasing, extractive energy production. It affects human cognition, human and animal circadian rhythms, and confuses animal behaviors. I have experienced life without artificial light for short periods, and I have to say I preferred it in many ways. It felt right to experience darkness at night, to go to bed only a short time after sunset, to awake with the sunrise. This is logical, considering our evolution…
In March of 2022, I encountered the song “It Gets Dark” by the Norwegian pop singer Sigrid, quoted and linked at the beginning of this post. I wrote a blog post at the time just appreciating the elegance of the literal and metaphorical message and how it struck me.
I’ve never, ever been this far away from home, and now I know
It gets dark, yeah, it gets dark and I
I’m moving at the speed of light, I have to go
But now I know, it gets dark so I can see the stars
Sigrid says “I’ve never been this far away from home and now I know it gets dark” and “it gets dark so I can see the stars”.
The literal: Many people, living their whole lives in and around cities, due to ever accelerating urbanization, don’t actually “know” that it gets dark at night. They would have to go far away from home to experience such a thing, to experience the fact that our little locality, our tiny blue marble, is placed within a massive, expanding cosmos moving at incredible speeds.
The Metaphorical: “It gets dark” can clearly be taken metaphorically as well. Life does indeed get dark…
I had a military colleague die by suicide just a couple of weeks ago. The darkness that descends on us in the wake of such shock and trauma and tragedy is hard to really capture. I am still very much in the midst of experiencing waves of de-realization and detachment. It is profoundly painful and confusing. Rest assured, I am not in danger, but I am not ok. I am healing, leaning heavily on those I am closest to.
But in the midst of this pain and suffering and darkness, the sky, impossibly dark, has filled with stars. The bright spots in my life, my friends and loved ones, my appreciation of the recently departed, and the beauty that still exists around me… these have somehow become more visible and relevant. I don’t think that it gets dark so that we can see these stars—I refuse to imbue every event with cosmic intent—but the light pollution of everyday trivialities (like work) dims out when it gets dark enough, and it becomes apparent that my constant focus on the trivial rendered me incapable of perceiving the actual.
Light pollution feels like an apt metaphor for the ways that we build and occupy a “home” which renders us incapable of acceptance, appreciation, connection with the great big beautiful universe which surrounds us.
In my previous post about that Sigrid song, I considered how culture often functions to blast signals outward that only reflect back on us and render us incapable of seeing the information that might otherwise reach us. We’re making so much noise that we can’t hear.
This reminds me a bit of
’s recommended practice in ‘Liminal Thinking’ that we “empty our cup” to become capable of receiving new information. This is the metaphorical journey away from home, captured by the Hero’s Journey as the transition from the known world to the unknown world where possibilities open up, where we and the world become capable of new perception and new change.What we need perhaps is to move from here to somewhere else, somewhere unfamiliar, and to quiet the bright and noisy systems we’ve erected which render us blind and deaf to the signals all around us.
An odd coincidence that just a few days after I wrote that initial blog post, I encountered this poem from my friend Jon Margolick on (then) Twitter.
I am sorry about your colleagues, and yourself.