Shining EXAMPLE

There is more than one way to see the light.

Nightly, with­out fail, one of us trails through the olive grove, a Cy­clops with fee­ble head torch, to give the pony her last feed and a lov­ing pat. The val­ley is swal­lowed by shad­ows. We give the old girl a lit­tle treat of soaked pinso just be­fore we head for bed. It can be nudg­ing mid­night. The rhythm seems to work - she is well and con­tent, 30 years old now. She is fam­ily.

The cor­ral is some dis­tance from the back door. We must weave through the trees, duck be­neath branches of the wal­nut, cross the main farm track and skirt the wild woods. I call to her. But I am call­ing to oth­ers too. These ink hours are the king­dom of the boar, genet, owl, fox, pine marten, rab­bit, to name but a few.

Night­fall is a mis­nomer. Dark­ness rises not falls. The shad­ows swell from the ground like a tide, from an­kles up to necks, from grass to tree­top and into in­fin­ity. We hu­mans love the cre­pus­cu­lar colours of tran­si­tion, the be­guil­ing crim­son fad­ing, but not so much that other lump of time, of haunt­ing black.

It is only black, though, be­cause (as with so many things) we fool our­selves.

The sun sets. We flick switches, and then we sleep. Streets, high­ways and build­ings pulse need­lessly with ex­haust­ing bright­ness. That is the rhythm whereby we must man­age, most of us... and miss out on in­fi­nite won­ders, not least ce­les­tial. In my life­time the ob­ses­sion and waste of en­ergy has grown ever more glar­ing as has our fear of the dark, fu­elled more than any­thing by our fear of each other.

As we talk of a sus­tain­able world, and also of boldly going where no woman or man has gone be­fore – Mars for starters – it is no bad thing to break the re­liance, or begin at least to sig­nif­i­cantly tone it down. I al­ways stop en route to the cor­ral to stand in this rare place spared the blind­ing pol­lu­tion, to switch off the torch, pa­tiently wait­ing for my eyes to ad­just and then re­mind­ing my­self of con­text; where I am and what it means to be alive. We are so clever yet it is al­ways deeply ed­i­fy­ing to look up and ac­cept how very lit­tle we re­ally know.

The most star­tling of human stains, ar­ti­fi­cial light, is a de­fin­i­tive ex­am­ple of our fears and force, waste and loss. We are di­ur­nal crea­tures, cravers of il­lu­mi­na­tion, fear­ful of shadow. So we ra­di­ate our power even more and weaken what we nat­u­rally need to see.

I have al­ways loved the min­i­mal soft, mel­low glow of the Pri­o­rat vil­lages, the faint warm pools in the swell of dark but dis­cernible land­scape. I find, in con­trast, white, un­re­lent­ing light­ing to be sick­en­ing.

What sense and ex­am­ple, then, now being shown by local and na­tional au­thor­i­ties here in Cat­alo­nia, here in this county. The Gen­er­al­i­tat and Diputació in Tar­rag­ona are en­abling Pri­o­rat com­mu­ni­ties through dif­fer­ent pro­jects to fur­ther di­min­ish light pol­lu­tion. At the same time they are mak­ing sig­nif­i­cant power sav­ings, re­duc­ing CO2 emis­sions and, hence, pro­tect­ing the night sky and a fun­da­men­tal el­e­ment of the qual­ity of life in this very spe­cial place.