MAKE THE GARDEN DARKER

In December 2022 I clipped this article: We need to make the world a Darker Place by Johan Eklöf, author of  The Darkness Manifesto. In it he argues for darkness, against light pollution. I worte on it, in shaky capital letters: MAKE THE GARDEN DARKER

The darker garden

At the house I lived in in the 00s, I bought a ten pack of solar lights and stabbed them into the lawn to mark out an otherwise undefined and easily losable path. They gave out a soft, white light. As the night wore on (there were many nights at this house where we would be awake at all hours) the lights would start to pulse gently, eventually winking out, one by one.  

I've had other lights over the years, but none recaptured the simple joy of that first set. In recent years, the lights have become smaller and feebler, the solar panels weaker and less efficient and they have seemed more obviously useless chunks of mixed metal and plastic waste, on the way to the bin. 

But I've also valued the darkness more. I have a back garden shaded by trees, but between the trees from the dark well of my garden, sat in a deckchair curled under a blanket, I can look up and see stars, bats, the faint lights of satellites and planes far overhead. 

So maybe I was talking about that

The overbright garden

But there was something else going on for me, and it's still there, to an extent. In common with many stroke survivors, I suffered from photophobia (fear of light) and visual field interruptions, hallucinations and absences, and I struggled in my overbright garden to manage the overwhelm of so much to process, to enjoy the pleasure of looking at my wild colourful outdoor space, and often found myself, shading my eyes (already shuttered behind sunglasses) thinking: please, make the garden simpler, less intense, easier, less overwhelm, darker.

Easier to process.