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It’s amazing how beautiful the sky is out in the country. The same sky but at the same time, totally different. A whole different world really…the sounds, the colors, the smells, the feeling.

Awesome point about it all being relative. Sometimes all you need is a change of perspective.

Very true. It can also apply to websites or design at all.

I live on a 21 acre horse farm 10 miles from the nearest gas station. Although development is adding quite a bit of light pollution, near the full moon you can read outside. On the new moon you can see the milky way.

I love it.

I remember being on tour with my old band The Octopus Project. We were somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Colorado and Toto, a bandmate, was driving. It was very late—well after midnight—but we were all still awake. Looking out the windows of the van was like looking into nothing. It was pitch black.

Toto decided to pull over onto some random dirt road so we could all step out of the van and stretch. There wasn’t a single unnatural light source as far as we could see—just the moon and the stars, and they were incredible. We could hear the sounds of coyote all around us, and we could see the faint outlines of mountains in the distance, but couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces. We all just kind of cautiously walked around for a while on this little dirt road and didn’t say a word. Just looked up at the sky.

It is without a doubt one of my favorite memories from my time with the band.

I remember having similar thoughts about how there’s dark and there’s DARK when in Hawaii this summer. Atop a 10,000 ft. volcano on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean it was absolutely incredible how much darker the sky was, how many more stars were visible. We sometimes forget how little true darkness we experience here in Chicago…

It’s cool, but it can also be a little frustrating at times. My island doesn’t have any street lights or anything, so it’s awfully hard to just go for a walk on a cloudy night after 7:30/8:00 these days.

I’m buying a headlamp soon though :-)

Some would disagree that light pollution is neither good nor bad. The New Yorker had quite a good article about it awhile ago.

Not everything is relative.

Dark? There was a giant full moon where I was last weekend!

It’s amazing how quickly and profoundly your vision adjusts when you step into deep darkness—it’s one of the few times that you appreciate how much your vision system is constantly adjusting and compensating for the level of light around you.

One great example (that I read in Steven Pinker’s book How the Mind Works) is that if you point a light meter at a lump of coal that’s outdoors in the sun, and at a snowball that’s indoors, it’ll show you that the lump of coal is actually reflecting more light than the snowball. Yet we perceive them simply as dark black and bright white.

Hurricane Ike left us without power for several days last month. The cool part of being in the dark, and without power, is that it’s a connector to what’s going on around you. Every once in a while, you catch the shine of a neighbor’s flashlight as they fumbled around in their home just as we were. Grilling parties and make shift dining rooms from open garages popped up everywhere. Everyone had their windows open, so you could here the neighbor kids practicing their pianos and horns. It was very refreshing in a way to be forced into old school life of a couple of generations ago.

A more relaxing instance to experience the dark of darkness (as compared to being out of power thanks to a storm) is aboard a boat in the middle of the open sea.

France is passing a law against light pollution, and a number of other European countries already have done so.

I think noise pollution is a more pressing concern, however, and the US is lagging behind Europe, specially Scandinavia in this respect. We could start by imposing stricter standards on motorcycles.

One of my favourite feelings, since I was a kid, was lying on my back at night and watching the stars move through the sky. You can literally feel the Earth beneath you spinning, and get a sense of scale that is so disorienteing it’s quite truly scary. You feel infinitesimal, sure, but more to the point, you realize that up and down and left and right are relative too, and you’re just a fly being held against a wall by the massive gravity of the body beneath you.

You can get a similar sensation from watching the clouds on very still days.

I think everyone should spend more time in the country as it helps get a great perspective on life (and indeed death).

with the lights of the city vs. the stars . . . just goes to show the effect of something close can influence how you like, y’know, perceive something that’s far away . .

And with that you have commented on the state of the times like a zen master!

This post reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the darkness during the night that the man experiences where he eventually just admits that having his eyes closed doesn’t make him see any worse.

@GeelWonder: Reminds me of the The Total Perspective Vortex.

From: wikipedia/Total_Perspective_Vortex

The Total Perspective Vortex is allegedly the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected. When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it is a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here…”

Located on Frogstar World B, the machine was originally invented by one Trin Tragula in order to annoy his wife. Because she was forever nagging him for having no sense of proportion, he decided to invent something that would show her what having a sense of proportion really meant. Unfortunately the shock of being placed in the Vortex destroyed her brain, but Trin Tragula’s grief was tempered by the knowledge that he had been right and she had been wrong. The Total Perspective Vortex illustrated that “In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”

Cheers, Marko

Jason…I greatly admire your work, but I’m surprised that you’re _ years old and have just now been struck by the essence of night.

It’s really a lesson on perspective.

So, “city folk” and “country folk” have a different perspective of the universe…literally, every night.

@Matt & Chris… I don’t think Jason is saying he’s never seen it before – just that he really noticed it this time. Frankly, I hope I’m NEVER too old to notice new things or take old things in in new ways.

@ Mark (Hurricane Ike): First, I pray for your communities speedy recovery.

Second, I live in Florida and in 2004, I experienced the exact same thing. I am outside all of the time (I’m big into hammocking). So, when the storms knocked out power for week to several weeks, the “new” sounds were so noticeable. It was interesting. I liked cooking out every night too.

Now, being out at sea, in the darkness of night is nice…but only when the sea is calm. Being in very rough seas, no moonlight, on a small/small-ish craft can be a terrifying experience.

@ Jay: Oh, I didn’t mean that in a condescending way.

I understood what Jason was saying. I was genuinely surprised that Jason was, ”...just now been struck by the essence of night”.

Many of Jason’s other posts point to the essence of so many things, it was interesting to see Jason’s observation.

I hammock a lot, so the darkness of night (and all of the glory that is revealed in the night sky) was a given for me.

To see Jason’s post was a lesson for me, as much as an observation for him.

Amen Jason. I get to venture outside of the booming metropolis of Cincinnati to the country every other weekend or so…and it’s really nice.

Even better for me is when there is a full moon out and it’s luminescence can make even the darkest countryside shine.

(kudos to SH for comment about learning.)

@ Sarah: I wasn’t denigrating Jason, as my other posts point out.

And, you could just say, “One can always relearn stuff in life.” No need to be sad or make judgments about me or what I believe.

There’s more to the universe than meets the eye—a lot more. Fun to See

I work in Boston but live 12 miles west in Waltham. Waltham is sort of on the border between continuous developement radiating outward from Boston, and rural towns. Right “across the road” (I-95) is Lincoln, MA, population 4500, just a small town made up of nothing but farms and forests and a few clusters of “civilization” revolving around a town hall, library and train station.

What I like about living “out here” is that I can see the dark sky and stars. I can hear real silence if I want. Now I know what real desolate places feel like. This is not desolate, but I can be at peace, I can feel the “quiet” of the world around me.

I like this. I can go into Boston, into the hustle and bustle, be around people and be the person I like to be for 10 to 12 hours. Then I can come home, put the car in the garage, and look up at the sky, and really see the clouds moving across the landscape. It’s so quiet it’s almost like I can hear them brushing up against hills and trees as that cross over.