The Light Changed Everything, with Clark Strand
Clark Strand and his wife, Perdita Finn
Our addiction to light is emptying our lives of mystery and renewal, having a devastating impact on our health, and is a root cause of larger ecological collapse. In this interview with writer, poet, and co-founder of The Way of the Rose, Clark Strand, we discuss the impacts of an over-lit existence and how the darkness and the divine feminine can help us find our way in these chaotic times.
To connect with Clark, visit: https://wayoftherose.org/
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Megan: Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to divest from capitalism and the norms of modern work and step into the soulful calling of these times we live in, which includes the call to rekindle our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother to two small kids, writer, amateur ecologist, and vocational guide.
I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm your host today.
Hi friend and welcome. Thank you for being here and sharing this time with me. I am really excited to bring you this episode today. Our guest today, Clark Strand, was the first person I knew I wanted to have for this season of the podcast. This summer, my friend Magda, who was with us in episode 99, gave me his book, Waking Up to the Dark: The Black Madonna's Gospel for an Age of Extinction and Collapse.
And I think I read it in like, two days. It was mind bending and inspiring and... compelling, and I weave a lot of it into our conversation today. I think Clark is doing really important, really grounded, thoughtful work, and he does a lot of it with his wife, Perdita Finn, who was on the show a couple of episodes ago, episode 104, on communicating with the dead.
I think it's essential life changing stuff that they're doing. I think this episode is going to have you thinking differently about darkness, about the trajectory of human history, about what is required of us right now, and what you might need more of in your own life and how to obtain it.
Let me introduce Clark to you more formally.
Clark Strand is the author of books on spirituality and ecology, including Waking Up to the Dark, Now is the Hour of Her Return, and with his wife Perdita Finn, The Way of the Rose, The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. He is the founder, with Finn, of The Way of the Rose, an international post religious spiritual fellowship dedicated to the rosary, the earth, and the lady, by any name you want to call her. A former senior editor for Tricycle, the Buddhist Review, he is the poetry columnist for the magazine.
So I think you're going to really love our conversation. And before I dive into our opening invocation, I just want to share two quick announcements, which the first is just to say thank you for those of you who are supporting the show by contributing financially.
If this podcast is meaningful to you, it makes a big difference if you could chip in and help make it sustainable for me to do. You can do that by contributing once or monthly, and you can learn more at buymeacoffee. com slash Megan Leatherman. And if contributing financially just isn't an option for you right now, sharing the show makes a big difference. Writing a review on Apple podcasts is a huge help, anything you can do to just sort of Give the show wings is always really, really appreciated.
And my second announcement is just that if you would like to work with the darkness of this time of year, this special downward slope into the darkest point, the winter solstice on December 21st, Then I want to let you know that we're about halfway through a free series I'm offering right now called Needing More: a four week pilgrimage into darkness.
And there are two weeks left if you'd like to join a little bit late. But it's a practice that you can continue for as long into the winter as you would like. It's a series of practices where we're turning off our electrical lighting earlier and earlier leading up to the winter solstice. It's very simple, and I think after hearing from Clark today, you might feel extra motivation to join us in this practice. The link to sign up for the remaining two weeks of that is in the show notes for you.
So with that, why don't I read us our opening invocation before we dive in? So wherever you are, whatever you're doing, whatever is happening in your life right now, I encourage you to just take a big, deep breath. Feel how alive you are, feel the fact that you're here on this earth right now.
May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet. May our work honor our ancestors, known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with. I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I am grateful to the Cowlitz and Clackamas tribes, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I am on.
Okay, well, Clark, thank you again for being here with us today.
Clark: Thanks, Megan. Happy to be with you.
Megan: I thought I would start by sort of steeping us in some of your words about darkness from your book, Waking Up to the Dark, and then I would love to start asking you some questions.
So this is from one of the earlier sections, and you wrote, "I have not described how darkness feels against the skin. Everyone has felt it, but in an age when consciousness itself is no longer consciousness, but only a byproduct of wattage, most people have forgotten the feeling of the dark. The darkness fits the body so well that we might as well be entering the water when we wear it. It flows everywhere the light is not, across every bone and sinew surrounding every hair. It hugs the shadow within a shadow and, when we are ready, lets down a milky richness white with stars. We come from the dark and we return to the dark. We are not merely in it, but of it. The darkness does our thinking when we let it, and it is the darkness in which we move."
I think I'd love to start by hearing a little bit more, anything you want to share with listeners about your sort of unique relationship to the dark and how you sort of began taking journeys in the nighttime even as a child. Could we start there?
Clark: Well, sure. I mean, the overall arc of my journey is the discovery that, you know, what seemed to kind of an eccentricity when I was a child and even into early adulthood turned out to be far more universal than I realized.
I didn't know any of that as a child. I didn't know why people awaken the night and know that that was a natural occurrence. I would simply, you know, wake after around four hours of sleep. Back in the early 1960s, we had moved from From Memphis, Tennessee to Anniston, Alabama, which is in the sort of foothills of the northern mountains of Alabama.
We lived near a golf course. You know, I wasn't particularly drawn to the golf course by day. You know, my family were all tennis players, but at nighttime I could sort of feel it calling to me. In the beginning, I would just lie awake in bed. I would just wake up naturally. You know, I guess there was less wattage back then.
It was a darker time, quite literally darker, you know, not morally or ethically darker, but then it is now certainly then, but it was, you know, there were fewer lights. And so maybe my parents put me to bed when the sun went down. I can't really remember at this point. But I would wake up and I would just lie in bed in the beginning, but then like any, you know, eight or nine year old started to get bored.
And so I would get up and wander around the house. And at a certain point, I realized I could go out on the back deck and look at the stars. And then from there, it was just, you know, a pretty easy job to realize that There was no one awake. There were no adults anywhere telling me, you know, to stay home.
And I wasn't particularly frightened of anything in the dark. So I began to walk on the golf course. Once I was out there in that big, heady starry silence, I was really hooked. You know, it was the most beautiful time and the most beautiful place, I think, you know, I'd ever seen. And so I would wander for sometimes an hour on that golf course before slipping back inside the house.
My parents never knew about this. My mother caught me once coming home from one of these jaunts and I pretended to be sleepwalking. And she believed the lie, I think, you know, I was wearing shoes, right? So. But you know what mother wants to ask herself what an eight or nine year old son has been, you know, doing out alone in the middle of the night in the dark, right?
I mean, it's not a question a parent wants to ask. I continued doing this. We moved to Atlanta. We lived in the northwest section of town. Atlanta was a darker city back then, the suburbs, you know, hadn't yet sprawled out quite as far as they have now. I only had to walk, you know, 10 or 15 minutes to find total darkness.
I would walk along these sort of old, you know, sparsely populated country roads in the northwest of Atlanta, not too far from the river. By the time I got to college, and I chose my college based on the fact that it was in the middle of nowhere, it was a good school, but it was located on 10, 000 acres, most of which was undeveloped forest land on the Cumberland Plateau.
And so I, you know, I think that was the time I really began in earnest to embrace, you know, waking up in the dark and walking at night. And I explored every inch of that plateau, you know, by dark. Later, I ended up becoming a Zen Buddhist monk and living in a monastery where the only lights were candles, you know, only lights were on after dark were candles, and it was very remote, very, uh, wooded wild area of the Catskill mountains, you know, without an electric light bulb, you know, for miles in any direction, and I would wander around the lake and through the graveyard.
You know, I was always up after the other monks. They'd go to sleep, I'd wake up, I'd go out into the, into the dark. That was the point I think I began to realize that there was a deep spiritual connection between the darkness and the human body. You know, that there was some way in which being in the dark, right? The state of mind that tended to unfold naturally in the dark was part of our, of our spiritual heritage passed down to us from our ancestors.
Megan: Thank you. Thanks for outlining where that journey began and it's still. I mean, you talk about it as if it, it just was so natural, but it's still sort of shocking to me.
I mean, I just can't imagine being out exploring this plateau, you know, every night by myself. It's amazing. Would you be comfortable sharing a little bit more about, I mean, this is, you talk about this so much in your book, but for us here today, could you help us sort of get solid for a minute in some more of those benefits you talk about with the darkness and the body and the spirit?
Clark: Yeah, what I didn't know when I was growing up, even, even when I was a monk, I really had no idea that human beings had once woken up in the middle of the night for two hours of, you know, what one modern researcher called quiet rest, but really was, was a state of consciousness that was so different from what we experience as modern human beings that, that it's really incomparable.
In the 1990s, I ran across an article in the New York Times that referenced a study done by a man named Thomas Weir at the National Institute of Health. And Weir was the guy who discovered seasonal affective disorder. He was one of the world's leading researchers on circadian rhythms. During the course of his research, he developed a burning question.
He wanted to know whether human beings, modern human beings, slept more or less differently than their Paleolithic ancestors. And he reasoned that since the human genome Changes very, very slowly, right? Is that our basic hardware, hardwired biology does not change quickly. He reasoned that, you know, the way we slept then, absent electrical lighting, would probably be the way we would sleep now, but was there a difference?
That was his question. So in order to get to the bottom of this, he took a group of subjects, you know, ordinary people of Bethesda, Maryland. And he took them off of all forms of electrical illumination after dusk for one month. And for the first three weeks, the only real effect was that everybody slept about an hour and a half longer.
Now Weir, you know, being a sleep researcher, reasoned that they were basically repaying what he called the national sleep debt. Because Americans specifically are so chronically sleep deprived, right, that they were just sleeping more because finally they were getting a rest. But at week three, something dramatic happened.
That's how long it took the body to reset to its paleolithic, you know, sort of reset within us. That's how long it took people to reclaim their paleolithic mode of sleep. After three weeks, the subjects lay in bed for about an hour or so and then promptly went to sleep. They slept deeply for four hours, and then they woke for two hours of what Weir called quiet rest.
They didn't know what else to call it. They didn't get up. They didn't move around. There was no lamp to turn on, right? Just darkness. Then they went back to sleep for another four hours before waking up. Now they're sleeping, you're getting eight hours of sleep, but now it is what the researchers call bimodal sleep, sleep that is bisected into two parts.
Weir became very curious about this two hour gap in the middle of the night. He asked people to describe it and they all said the same thing, which is that they had never felt such peace in their entire lives. Tremendous peace. They also said that during the day they were more awake than they had ever been in their lives.
He was very curious about both of these phenomena, so he investigated both of them. He found out that during this two hour gap, people were experiencing something that wasn't really waking and wasn't really sleeping, but was a state of mind all its own. with its own endocrinological portrait, right? Its own profile.
He discovered that the hormone prolactin, which is the hormone that lets down in mammals, you know, in mothers when they're nursing and, and also in birds when they're roosting on their nests, right? He discovered that this hormone that keeps us still while we're asleep and keeps mothers focused on their children when they're nursing, that this level, which rises naturally when you fall asleep, remained at sleep levels while these people were awake during these two hours of the night.
So their, their bodies were asleep, but their minds were awake. And there's this wonderful verse from the Song of Songs, right? This beautiful, erotic love poem, smack dab in the middle of the Bible where nobody can figure out how it got there, right? In the Song of Songs, the beloved says to her lover, I sleep But my heart is awake, right?
And, and, you know, I've always sort of bought the party line that, you know, this was a, you know, sort of a mystical statement about, you know, union with God and whatnot. But, but now I realize, of course, that, you know, what the poem is describing is an actual state of mind that virtually everyone before the industrial revolution had some direct experience of.
It wasn't until the advent of modern incandescent lighting that people stopped sleeping this way. You only have to go back two or three hundred years and read the journals and diaries that people kept to realize that around the world everybody is getting up in the middle of the night for something.
Sometimes they would clean, sometimes they'd light a candle and read, often they would wander around, you know, in monasteries and ashrams and all over the world, they would pray. Or chant. And so, you know, Weir discovered basically that there was, hidden in the middle of the night, there was this relic of an earlier way of being and living in the world.
And an earlier way of marking time, experiencing time and consciousness. Before we move on, just one interesting little tidbit. He also became curious, were they really more awake during the daytime? Right. He said he wanted to know, I mean, or did they just feel rested? So they reported being more awake. He did what all scientists do.
And he tried to figure out, is there a way to measure their wakefulness to see if they really are more awake? So he found a group of researchers who had developed a test. And basically, it measures sleep latency. It measures wakefulness by how long it takes you from that state to like, you know, fall asleep.
Anyway, he gave this to his subjects and he found that indeed, they were more awake. They were more awake than fighter pilots. Okay, let's let that sink in. They were more awake than fighter pilots. These were ordinary people who had taken off electrical lighting for one month, had reverted to an earlier way of living and living and sleeping and being fully awake and conscious, right, that had been encoded in their genes and handed down from their ancestors.
Megan: That is really compelling and makes me want to like get new blackout curtains and get rid of every light at night. I remember there was another, I think an analysis of Weir's work that you referred to in the book that these other two authors had talked about how if we don't even have at least nine and a half hours exposed to darkness, maybe not even sleeping, but just We literally need it or else the body's, you know, diabetes rise, like there are addictions to sugar, alcohol, you know, it's just, it's amazing the spiritual potential in those two or so hours, but also just the effect on the body.
I mean, it's all completely connected and it's not, it doesn't sound like a huge ask. Like those people weren't sleeping for 14 hours at a time. It's still eight hours of sleep, but broken up in a different way. Yeah, it's really an amazing picture that you paint about what's possible.
Clark: The book you're alluding to is called Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival.
Wiley and Formby, the two researchers who wrote that book, they were manager scientists who were studying the diabetes epidemic. And their research led them progressively more and more in the direction of sleep and artificial lighting. What they discovered was pretty much what Weir discovered, which was that we are, we are hardwired to sleep in a certain way.
And we are hardwired for anywhere from, you know, 8 to 12 to 14 hours of darkness, depending on seasonal fluctuations throughout the year. And if our bodies don't get this, then we can't be physically healthy. Specifically, we're more likely to get heart disease, developmental illness, infertility, you know, addictions, to, to suffer from addictions, all kinds of things.
The interesting thing was that when Wiley and Formby went to interview Weir for their book about his study, they said to him, don't people have a right to know that on less than, you know, eight and a half hours of sleep in total darkness a night, they are almost certain to develop one of the following, one or more of the following conditions.
They list like, you know, ten or twelve terrible life threatening conditions. And Weir said famously, well, yes. They have a right to know, but it won't matter. No one will ever turn out the lights, right? This is what the one guy, you know, who is in the best position to know how important it is to experience darkness said, it doesn't matter.
No one will ever turn out the lights. Now he was a realist. I believe that most human beings won't turn out the lights and we'll keep them burning for as long as we can. Fortunately, I don't think that we will be able to do that. I don't think that there's a... you know, people talk about the future of this or that. I don't see a long and illustrious future for artificial lighting on this planet, personally.
Megan: What makes light, and either literally and also metaphorically, what makes it so addictive to us, do you think?
Clark: Well, it's the master switch for hormone production, so it's natural, we need light, we need sunlight, we need vitamin D, creatures who depend on light, you know, and light is the one thing that comes from outside of the atmosphere that's necessary for life.
Everything else that's necessary for life is contained on earth, only light is added to that equation, but light determines everything. In the right proportion, light governs the seasons, right, it governs the weather, the temperature, it, what causes growth, right, all things, almost all things yearn towards the light in some way or another, or at least towards something that yearns for the light.
Plants germinate in the soil and the weather changes, you know, they poke their way up into the light. The leaves, in autumn, when the sunlight reaches a certain slant, right, they begin to turn colors in fall. And so, seasons of the, you know, of our planetary ecology, the seasons of the soul, the seasons of the human body, all of these are governed by light and regulated by light.
The sun is the great regulator. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. It's only when we create a 24 hour cycle of light, right, when we really try to chip away at the darkness until there's no darkness left, that a problem develops. Because light and darkness are a pair, they belong together in proper proportion.
And in order for life on earth to flourish, that proportion, you know, it needs to be pretty carefully regulated just as it is by the turning of the earth around the sun over the course of the solar year, right? We have been designed, every, every aspect of our being as human beings and every, nearly every aspect of, of all the myriad beings, plants and animals we see around us have been designed to survive, you know, the course of a solar year at a particular latitude, in a particular area on Earth. If you disturb that too much, then suddenly, you know, our bodies don't know how to behave.
Megan: What would you say are some of the hallmarks, culture or collective, that is addicted to light out of proportion?
Clark: You know, you just turn on, you know, open your laptop, look at anything, social media everywhere.
I mean, it's, I would say that, you know, light creates addiction. Light creates certainty. Light is the father of desires, the way I like to think of it. Light is the father of desire, right? Thornby and Wiley, in Lights Out, Sleep, Sugar, Survival, they make a very compelling case for the fact that before the invention of artificial illumination, and by artificial illumination, they mean everything back, you know, back to, you know, the earliest fire light, you know, and the rock shelters and hide tents of our, of our ancestors, right?
The introduction of artificial light began to change the human body. In the beginning, the change was very minor, right? Human beings who had once consumed carbohydrates in, in, in, you know, great plenty only in summer, would nearly always conceive in August. And then they would carry, they would build up enough fat, women would build up enough fat in their bodies to survive through the winter.
They would give birth in the springtime, pretty much all human beings, you know, with some variation to latitude would follow that pattern. But what happened when we began to bring firelight into our dwellings, right? We begin to develop rush lights and then candle lights, tallow lights, finally oil and gas lights and electric lighting, incandescent lighting.
When we did that, we tricked our bodies into believing that it was August every day of the year, right? That the days were at their longest, right? And so, you know, what light is telling our bodies, the degree of light that we experience now, the artificially extended length of our days, they're telling the photoreceptors in our cells that it's time to eat, eat, eat, and mate, mate, mate, like there's no tomorrow.
Right? Because that ensures the survival of our species. And so we eat more, we consume more. When people are up awake on the internet all night long shopping, they consume more, right? It wasn't just that the Industrial Revolution developed, you know, uh, brighter and brighter, degrees of illumination so that people could work longer hours, you know, and do, you know, work that would previously been considered too dangerous to do by dim lighting, could be done in bright lighting.
You know, sometimes in 24 hour cycles, it wasn't adjusted that they were trying to boost productivity, right? They were also adding hours of consumption onto the day. So capitalism itself is, is really, and we, we say, we say that the modern world is driven by oil. Petroleum, it really is driven by light.
Light is what drives our consciousness. Light is what fuels and stimulates us. You see it everywhere you look, there's light reflected off the, you know, mirror sides of buildings and, and downtown areas, it's in billboards, you know, it's on all of our screens, everywhere you look there's light, light, light, and more light, and very little dark.
Megan: Could you speak a little bit about where you see us on the sort of arc of collapse, like it's very brightly lit process of collapse. If you want to say anything about where we are sort of in that arc, and then how can darkness help us essentially, like be with whatever is here now and what might come? I know that's a huge question, but anywhere you want to take that...
Clark: Well , it's a huge question. There's one, I don't, I don't really know the answer to the first part of that question, which is, you know, when will the end come? That's a game people have been playing for a very long time. And even today, when we're no longer, you know, turning to the, you know, to the biblical prophets to answer that question, we're, we're, you know, talking, speaking with climate scientists and policymakers and energy experts and so forth and so on.
Even with all that we know, we still can't really say with any great precision sort of where we are in that arc. There's the old joke about the guy who, Falls off a hundred story building. He's passing somebody on the, as he falls, he passes somebody on the second floor and the guy yells out, how's it going?
He says, so far, so good. Right. So, so, you know, we, we could be very, uh, we can be very close to, to collapse right now. I don't foresee a world by the end of this century where we are able to feed anywhere near even the current population of the world. Our current population is the product of, really, of, of...
I mean, it's a product of many things, you know, differences, you know, improvements in healthcare in many parts of the country, you know, so, I mean, in many parts of the world, but more than anything, it's dependent on petrochemical fertilizers, right? In the absence of, you know, easily available and deployable petroleum fertilizer, there's no way to produce the, the monoculture crops in sufficient quantity to feed the number of people that even we even currently have on earth. And we're not likely to see an increase in production, you know, like after 2050. You know, I don't envision any scenario where there aren't far fewer people on the planet by the end of this century.
I mean, I pray that there are far fewer people on this planet by the end of the century, because I don't think there's any chance of human beings surviving if there aren't. Hopefully that will happen, you know, through natural attrition and fall, you know, the fall infertility rates, but there are a number of ways it could happen.
But climate change alone will, you know, will ensure that our current levels of productivity cannot be sustained. Mm hmm. Agricultural product, that is. Mm hmm.
Megan: So, short of electric light sort of being taken away out of necessity, what might your hope or encouragement be around how to bring the darkness more into our lives and maybe go to that place, you know, maybe proactively or by choice?
Like you've mentioned, you've mentioned before, it's really difficult to do this, like in that study by Thomas Weir , like it was a, a very concerted effort, right? To give people total darkness after dusk for a month. And that may not be accessible for most of us. But anything you could say about how we can start working with The Dark proactively with, you know, big changes happening around us?
Clark: Well, there are a number of things to do. One thing is, you know, Waking Up to the Dark was first published in 2015. A lot of people, the takeaway that a lot of people got from the book was that they should start walking in the middle of the night or get rid of all their electric lights and so forth and so on.
You know, and although I didn't dissuade people in the book of that idea, I didn't exactly, you know, offer that as a sort of realistic alternative for most people. What I spent a lot of the book writing about and later came to, to identify what I call the cultivated dark. So there's the absolute dark, and then there's the cultivated dark.
The absolute dark is literally, you know, having few or no sources of artificial lighting in your environment after dusk each day. Right? You can achieve that if you really, really want to, like you can move to a cabin in the woods or talk to people who even in urban environments, well, like you said, use blackout curtains or something like that to create darkness for themselves.
But most people will experience themselves as falling hopelessly out of step with their friends and family and with the world that they live in with their employment, you know, with the needs of their family and so forth and so on if they do that. You can go and live in a Zen monastery like I did in the mountains, where you'll get enough darkness, but if you're not willing to do that and not willing to, to sort of go all out and make that the main thing you do, right, is to, you know, experience a natural, un augmented state of consciousness, then you're going to need to cultivate the dark. And what that means is cultivating a numinous state of mind. That can be done a lot of ways. Meditation is one, right? Mindfulness practice. People experience it when they go to a therapist's office and lie in a dimly lit room on a couch and talk. People experience it when they keep dream journals.
The cultivated dark is a way of cultivating a lack of certainty about the world. There was a Jesuit scholar named John Staudenmayer who wrote a paper that was very influential on my way of thinking. It was for the Boardman Lecture, I think it was either University of Pennsylvania or Pennsylvania State University. Back in the 90s, he wrote a book on The holy, or he wrote a paper on the holy dark. And Stoudemire's idea, he was a, a historian of technology was that as human beings have developed progressively brighter and brighter forms of artificial illumination, they have become more and more stuck in the idea of certainty and the belief that everything can be known and everything can be controlled, that everything should be controlled. Everything should be subject to human oversight, right? And human direction. So if you read Stoudemire through from beginning to end his writings on this subject, you come away with an idea that I never, I don't think he quite got this far, but I believe this was at the bottom of his way of thinking, is that light is the main fuel for an anthropocentric way of thinking - the belief that human beings are at the center of the universe, and everything revolves around them, everything is or should be subject to their control, or is theoretically within their purview. So anything that you do, that you can find. Gardening is a good example, right? Forest bathing, walking, you know, walking outside in natural light.
These are ways of cultivating the dark, cultivating the numinous. Anything basically that takes you off the treadmill, the endless treadmill of getting and spending, that we call modern, modern life, globalism, capitalism, anything that does that, even for a brief period of time, is going to help you to reset your way of thinking.
Ideally, what you want to do is you want these two modes of being, the absolute dark and the... Cultivated dark to meet one another. You want to find that you're so comfortable being in your own skin being in your own, you know, experiencing the bedrock of your own immediate personal consciousness that you are able to tolerate more physical darkness, literal darkness in your life. That when you walk into a room in the evening and there are three light bulbs on, you turn two of them off and then when you begin to feel a little drowsy, you're comfortable turning the other one off rather than staying up, scrolling endlessly on your phone for hours, right?
You become more comfortable with the literal dark. You're less inclined to, to use artificial lighting when it's available to you. It basically becomes a choice. And so most people will find that if they have a way of cultivating the darkness, it will lead them to the experience of the literal dark. Does that make sense?
Megan: Yeah, I had never thought about it that way. I have been trying to get myself out into the absolute darkness more as a way to try and be more comfortable with it. But I, I think what you're saying is that we can actually cultivate that comfort in the light time, but like by developing this more numinous state of mind.
And so that maybe if I started there and grew that more, I might also have this more natural comfort in the absolute darkness. Yeah, I can see now how they're connected. I really appreciate that. Another big piece of this book that you wrote is the connection between the darkness and how it led you to the Great Mother or Black Madonna.
Could you talk about the connection between those two, the darkness and also the sort of origin of everything and yeah, anything you want to say about that?
Clark: Well, yeah, my wife Perdita, she likes to joke that After I stopped being a Zen Buddhist monk in 1990, I spent the next 20 years trying to get patriarchy right.
And it's really true. Guilty as charged. I didn't know that that's what I was doing. Right? For me, it just seemed like, well, you know, Zen didn't work for me. Maybe one of these other heavy handed patriarchal religions, you know, is, is going to, is going to hold the answer. Maybe, maybe it's just this isn't the right one, right?
Maybe there's a better one. So I moved restlessly from one spiritual tradition to another, and what really drove my search was, was not just, you know, trying to get patriarchal patriarchy right, but what I was really searching for was, I wanted to answer the question: is there one of these traditional religious or spiritual modalities that holds the answer to the problems, the converging catastrophes of the 21st century?
My brother is a research biologist, a plant geneticist who specializes in plant populations, right? And he began telling me in the 1990s about climate feedback loops and about the sixth extinction. And this was long before any of these were a topic of conversation in the, in the news media or the magazines, or even in most ecology journals.
My brother was collecting plant samples, very large samples. The samples were so large and he had so much data that in those days, the only way he could do his statistical analyses was to hire computers from the military, right? The big, huge mainframe computers. And as he would read the results that came in from these population studies, plant population studies, the news wasn't good.
I remember him telling me at one point, you know, in very sober minded fashion, I want to say around 1993 or 1994, he said, bad times are coming. I said, well, what can we do? And he said, well, you can do whatever you want. But the global feedback loop is 50 years. So whatever you're doing now, you're doing for 50 years in the future.
And he said, in the next 50 years, things are going to happen that are probably going to make anything that you do now, really just a drop in the bucket. So he was very, You know, I had a pretty bleak outlook on that, which I have to say has been, you know, borne out by most of the subsequent studies done by his colleagues and then later by climate scientists.
So, in any case, I was really searching desperately, you know, were there, were there any traditions anywhere that I could find that, that made sense ecologically that had, you know, that were ecologically valid in the early 2000s. So, as part of a kind of, religious think tank is the way I would describe it.
A guy named David Waters, who'd been at Newsweek, he started an online community of about, I think there were like 20 of us, maybe, from various different fields of study. I think I was the resident Buddhist at that time. And he gave us a blog at the Washington Post. And he said, Get together and, you know, we'll throw out topics and write whatever you want to on this topic and engage with one another, talk to one another.
And we did that. You know, some of my, the ideas that, you know, would later appear in my books were sort of gestated in that environment. And one of them was this idea that finally boiled down to a three word slogan. Ecology, not theology. Ecology, not theology. So in the second decade of my search to get patriarchy right, I began to apply that formula to various different texts that I had read.
You know, if you were in my house now, you'd go look at my bookshelf, you'd find, you know, all the great spiritual books, shelf after shelf after shelf. You know, at one point or another, I'd read all of them. I began to go back through everything I had read and say to myself, Is this ecologically valid? Does this have any ecological validity whatsoever?
I threw out entire sections of the Bible. There's just absolutely no ecological validity whatsoever. Surprisingly, other parts of the Bible, not only did I accept them, but they became like holy texts for me, like the book of Job, which basically answers the question, what happens to a man that believes that he can eat and not be eaten?
What happens to a man who thinks he can exist independently from the planetary ecology, right? Or the Song of Songs, which is about the, is ostensibly about two lovers, but it's really about the cosmic dance, you know, between the light and darkness and how they come together to maintain the balance of all life on earth.
I found in the Bhagavad Gita, in the Lotus Sutra, and in, you know, some ancient Hasidic texts, or, you know, Hasidic texts, but ancient Jewish texts, right? So, there's a book on Tikkun Hizot, or cutting the night in two. About waking up to pray in the middle of the night. So I found all of these texts, but they were like, you know, they were just what was left, the wisdom of our paleolithic ancestors, what remained as a kind of a relic within the spiritual texts of the modern age.
So that sort of prepped me, I guess you would say. By the time 2011 came along, I had, I guess, reached the end of that journey. And I had really decided, I was done with religion of any kind. I used to joke that you could put the Dalai Lama in a room with me and, you know, I'd be bored within five minutes. I mean, just bored.
Absolutely bored. Yeah, maybe he's very spiritually wise. But, you know, in my, after that project of reading through all those texts, you know, very few supposedly wise teachers held any credibility at all in my mind, right? Francis, Pope Francis wrote a book on the planetary ecology and the need to save the earth, right?
Right, papal encyclical, which everybody read, right? I read it. I got to the end of it. It was laughable. I didn't throw it in the trash because I figured I might as well, I might need to make use of it at some point, right? But it was laughable, you know, and so, and so I, you know, I came out the other side of this experience feeling that these religious traditions have utterly failed to prepare us for what lay ahead.
And so I was in a sort of a free floating state. I don't know what I would call it. I spent a lot of time in prayer. I spent a lot of time walking in the middle of the night. You know, the night of June 16th, 2011, I was getting up for my usual walk in the middle of the night. And I went and put my hand on the doorknob to leave the house.
Beautiful moonlit night. And I felt a hand on my right shoulder. A male voice said to me, Don't go out tonight. Remain inside and be very, very still. I'm not a person who's heard voices before, particularly had visions or anything like that. In my Zen Buddhist training, you were taught that these were makyo or illusion. And the best way to get rid of them was just to ignore them. So I had very little experience with anything like this, but You know, I, the voice was persuasive, and so I, I put myself on the couch, and you know, I, I knew from being a Zen monk how to be very still, so I made myself very still. About 40 minutes passed.
I felt the presence of someone in the room.
Although logically, it couldn't, you know, it couldn't have been anyone there. I would have heard them come in. My wife is asleep upstairs, my children. So I opened my eyes and looked, and there in front of me was a young girl, about 17 years old. And she had a pale, moon like face, freckles around her nose, hazel eyes, short, cropped, auburn hair.
And over her lips was an X of black electrical tape. And the Zen, the part of my brain that, you know, had, had studied Zen Buddhism for 14 years, eventually taught Zen Buddhism, been a monk, you know, had a temple of my own, that part of my brain said, yeah, this is, this is illusion. Just, you know, just stare it down.
It'll go away. And that staring contest lasted all of about three seconds. Okay. And I thought later, I thought, yeah, that was that, that was the end of my Zen career, final death knell. I thought, oh, they were wrong. Yeah, they were wrong. This is not illusion. And I saw this girl's face and I thought, my thought was really, you know, that probably all the rest of my life was an illusion, but she was real.
That the, the rest of my life might've been an illusion, might've been a dream, but this was real. And I did what I think anyone would've done in that circumstance. I had no idea what I was, who I was seeing or what was happening, but it was completely convincing. So I leaned forward and, and careful not to touch her because I didn't know what would happen if I actually physically touched her, I took the corner of the tape. And I peeled it back from her lips. I could feel it pulling against her skin. When I did that, she gave a great gasp, like she hadn't been able to breathe. And then I started to ask the obvious question, which is, who are you? But she shook her head very slowly and, keeping her eyes on mine.
And then We looked at one another, I don't know, maybe five minutes passed , maybe ten, maybe not that long. And then the Zen part of my brain went out again, and I closed my eyes. And when I opened them again, about forty minutes later, she was gone. But I woke up the next morning, and two things happened. One was, I felt her.
I couldn't see her, but I felt her presence directly to my left and she's always there. She's been there ever since I don't see her very often But I really feel her presence always and I can hear her. She speaks. But that was one thing. The other thing was I became obsessed with finding the tape. I was sure I was just sort of mad with the desire to find it, I guess to prove to myself that what I experienced was, was a physical presence.
And so I tore the whole house apart downstairs looking for the tape and of course I couldn't find it. And I wouldn't explain to my, you know, to Perdita or the kids what I was doing. And finally, I guess by the end of the day, I just accepted the fact that something utterly mysterious that I had no frame of reference for... I mean, I had not one book in my entire library on the Divine Feminine. Not one book on the Goddess. Not one book about the Virgin Mary. Or Inanna, the great mother of the Upper Paleolithic, any of, any of these things. You know, I was a tabula rasa where this was concerned, or not quite, because if anything, I would have been prejudiced against such an experience and such, such a, an apparition and nothing, nothing had prepared me for it.
Nothing could prepare me for it. Except for one thing, and that was waking up in the middle of the night and spending so much time in the darkness. What I discovered going forward was that the figure that is called the, the Great Mother, and sometimes, you know, in the Middle Ages, called the Black Madonna, is intimately connected to the dark and to the neurochemistry of the human body and the brain.
And that this chemical prolactin, which lets down in nursing mothers that rises during the hour of God is, is intimately connected to our understanding of the divine feminine and our experience of her.
Megan: That is an incredible story. Thank you so much for sharing that. And you and Perdita are pulling that thread through.
I mean, you're still like working with that and have created a lot to continue to bring that forward. Do you, could you say a little bit about how you're, I mean, sometimes people have these mystical experiences and it's so much, they don't know what to do with it. And so it sits on a shelf for a long time or it's scary to us or we shut it away.
And it seems like from my point of view, you're really, you're honoring what was given to you that night and could you say a little bit about how you're bringing that into the world?
Clark: Well, you know, there wasn't, I guess there was always a choice, but I think the choice was made the moment I removed the tape.
Because I've never looked back after that, and that changed all of our lives, you know, my life, Perdita's life, my daughter's life, my son's life, changed everything for us. But yeah, there is really, you know, you can't unsee something like that. And when she began to speak and Perdita began to record her messages, you can't unhear the things that she says.
One of the things that she said early on, and I, by the way, Perdita always says that I knew in my heart that I was witnessing an apparition of the Virgin Mary, right, in the sort of Western cultural context of that, of that figure. And it makes sense that that's who I was seeing, but I really kind of rejected that idea for about 10 weeks.
I really didn't want to go there. I was terrified that that meant I was supposed to become Catholic. Believe me, of the, on the list of religions that I, religious ideologies that I had rejected during my years of subjecting that, you know, ecology, not theology test to the scriptures and to, you know, religious beliefs and traditions and dogma, the Catholic church was not high on the list of acceptable alternatives for me.
I mean, it was low. So I didn't know what was expected. I had no idea, but around 10 weeks after the initial apparition, she woke me one night and said, if you rise to say the rosary tonight, a column of saints will support your prayer. And I had taught myself the rosary along with a lot of these other traditions, you know, these other practices years ago and, you know, learned it and said it for maybe a month and then abandoned it and gave it no further thought years earlier, so I knew how to do it.
So I woke up and I began to say the rosary. Once I realized that, you know, that, that she had asked me to say the rosary, and it made a promise based on whether I said it or not, I thought, okay, yeah, I guess, I guess that's what we're dealing with here, right? This is that figure. Although, really, she's so much older than the church, you know. We're not, we're talking, only talking about the, the latest, you know, most current incarnation of a figure that, that, you know, predates human memory and goes as far back into our, you know, sort of human awareness as you can go. This, this great mother. So, you know, we began to pray the rosary and it was true, you know, we felt supported, you know, impossible situations resolve themselves. Improbable scenarios unfolded .
You know, she, I asked her at one point early on, our lady, I asked, what am I supposed to do? Am I, am I supposed to go like, you know, one of these French peasant girls? Am I supposed to go and find the Bishop and tell him the story? I really didn't know. I was willing, I wasn't willing to become Catholic, but I was willing to do that if it's just what she wanted me to do. And she said, no, the editors are the bishops now. I want you to write a book. By that I guess she meant that the editors were, you know, were the people who decides what is worthy of belief, not the bishops. Or at least that she wasn't concerned about the legitimacy in the eyes of the Catholic Church, you know, she wasn't, you know, wasn't something on her radar or something she felt, felt she needed or wanted.
And so, I wrote a book, and, Waking Up to the Dark, and I wrote about my experiences of the darkness. You know, but really it's those last three pages of the book, The Gospel According to the Dark, which are entirely her words. The whole first part of the book about the sleep studies and the hour of God and all the various different traditions in the world's religions of waking up in the middle of the night to pray or meditate or chant, those are all just a very long introduction to those last three pages. Really, it's just about that message.
So she told me to write this book, so I wrote it, I sent it to my agent, and my agent normally would read something in 48 hours and get back to me, usually with a suggestion or two, and then a week later, she would send it out, you know, to whatever editor I happened to be working with, or if we wanted a new editor, to a new group of editors, then she would sell the book.
Two weeks passed and I hadn't heard from her. I knew this was bad news. So I finally call her up and I say, what's going on with the book, Waking Up to the Dark? What do you, what do you think? And she said, I have to tell you, I'm not loving it. And I said, really? She said, yeah, I think the best that could happen is that, you know, maybe one of the junior editors at one of the major houses will take an interest in the spiritual memoir and the science writing, right, and will try to talk you off the ledge of the last part, which is about the Black Madonna and the apparition.
And so I had already been told by her lady that the book would sell - that she had chosen the editor already and that it would be published quickly Without you know any any revisions to the text. So I believed that. She had already told me enough things already that had come to pass that I trusted her so I said to my agent I said well if I sell the book myself, will you handle the, the deal, the contract? She said, will I catch the baby and cash my check? Sure.
So that night I sent an email to the top 20 spiritual book editors in America with the text of the book attached and a cover letter that basically just said "our lady has chosen one of you to publish this book quickly without revision. She knows which one you are, but I don't. So I'm having to send it to all of you."
She says, whoever the editor is, will know that they're the one. So Perdita was like biting her nails and saying, This is professional suicide. Absolute professional suicide. Right. You don't do something like this. You don't contact the editors directly, even though I knew a lot of them, you know, I had known them for years and you certainly don't, you know, send out a book with, with such an outlandish claim, even if it's true.
So I did, I sent it out and I got back very bemused emails. Like, you know, I got back emails from people I'd known for 20 years who said, wow, Clark, did you go off your meds? I didn't even know you were on meds, you know, Another person would say, you know, maybe not my cup of tea, being very politely, or I love the science writing or whatever.
One woman, whose name I won't mention because she's, I think, currently still the president of one of the major houses, the editor at the time, wrote me back and said, there's no way I'm publishing this book. But, having read it... I have no idea how to live my life. What do you suggest? Because what you're saying is obviously true.
And I wrote her back and I said, Well, I don't know how to answer that question. You could publish the book. There's a start. So then about, I want to say a week after that, I was saying the rosary, and, uh, our lady showed me the face, her vision, showed me the face of a woman I'd never seen before. She said, prepare to meet with this woman in two weeks time.
I think about a week maybe passed, and praying the rosary again, and she showed me another vision of the same woman digging with a spade made of light underneath a tree, around the roots of a tree. And she said, she's reading the book. And then like, I think the next day, I get a call from the editor who published the book, and she said, will you, will you come into the city and have lunch with me? And I Googled her name, you know, and it was the face of the woman that had been shown. So I went down there to lunch, I sat down, the first thing she says to me is, I'm the one. Wow. So you can't make this stuff up, right? I mean, you know, it's very convincing to be in the middle of it.
So people say, you know, how do you do what you do? You know, I say, how do you not?
Megan: Wow. Well, thank you for risking professional suicide and giving this book to the world. It definitely has changed my life and my perspective. So thank you so much for listening and making your journeys in the dark and preparing for that visitation and everything that you've done to contribute to these wild times. Really, thank you.
Clark: Thank you, Megan. It's a pleasure talking with you.
Megan: Where can people find you and hear more about the work that you're doing right now?
Clark: Well, that's very easy. All you have to do is go to wayoftherose. org Wayoftherose. org, and that's our website, you know, that has links to our books, but also to our Way of the Rose community, which is now spread all over the world. We have, I don't know how many rosary meetings in person or on zoom every week, but dozens and dozens, sometimes as many as 8 or 10 a day . We have a Facebook group that you can search for, Way of the Rose, on Facebook, about around, I think, 25, 000 members at this point.
It's one of the most active spiritual groups on Facebook. You know, so, Perdita just wrote a new book, Take Back the Magic, which is the third book in the Way of the Rose trilogy. The first book is, is Waking Up to the Dark. Second is The Way of the Rose, Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary.
And the most recent book is Take back the magic: conversations with the unseen world. I wrote the first book, Perdita and I co wrote the second book and Perdita wrote the third. Other than that, you know, my day job is I am, I believe the only full time professional haiku poet outside of Japan. I write haiku poetry about the seasons and I teach it.
So I have a very lively, weekly and monthly and yearly group that I work with. People love to get together and to write these little poems about the, the beauties and wonders of the passing seasons and share them with one another. And so I spend most of my time overseeing that poetic community and, you know, helping to manage our Way of the Rose community, which, you know, is pretty easy. We don't have any leaders or anything. The leaders of it, we just sort of facilitate it. And it sort of runs on its own steam. So that's how they get in touch with us. Sure.
Megan: Thanks. I'll put the link in the show notes so everyone has easy access to it.
Clark: Thank you so much.
Megan: Thank you, Clark.
Okay, my friend, I hope that you got a lot out of that conversation. I really encourage you to get Clark's book and to check out the interview that I did with his wife Perdita in episode 104 if you haven't listened to that already. I think they're doing awesome work and it's definitely worth following along.
I will be back with you next week with another interview episode. Again, if you would like to join us for the remaining two weeks of needing more: a four week pilgrimage into darkness, you can Learn more and sign up at the link in the show notes. And of course, if the show is meaningful to you and you are able to contribute financially, you can do that at buymeacoffee. com slash Megan Leatherman. Take such good care and I'll see you on the other side.