“Artificial light broke the rhythm that the sun and moon had hitherto imposed on daily activities; the clock separated the human mind from cyclical natural processes.”
-Mattias Desmet, “The Psychology of Totalitarianism”
“Unless time is understood as sacred, experienced in all its fullness, and so dominant a consideration in the life of a people that all other functions are subservient to it, it is impossible to have a complete and meaningful ceremonial life. Rituals lose their efficacy because they are performed within a secular time which does not always make room for them or give them the status they deserve.”
-Vine Deloria Jr., “Out of Chaos” (Parabola magazine)
When I awake this time of year, it’s still dark. I stoke the fire, then walk out our door and head east. On a clear morning, the stars shine, but if it’s cloudy the hollow is black, the surrounding hills invisible. Somewhere along the gravel driveway I pause to make a brief morning prayer, and if I’m too close to the chicken coop, the rooster hollers at me. Then I walk up to my mother’s house, which has electricity and where I write in a basement office.
Such is my routine.
I make coffee. I write for two or three hours, then head home to start the day with my family.
Before the empire interrupted, the walk home at this time of year would include a lesson in light.
The hill to the north of our house stands leafless and gray, worn out by winter like the rest of us. On my walk home, however, the rising sun would often hit that gray hilltop and crown it with an otherworldly glow, revealing not only the coming day of the hollow but the coming day of the soul.
Or if I’d leave a little early, the sun would not yet hit the peak, and I’d long for it; or a little later, and the whole hill would be bathed in light, with the shadowed land beginning somewhere between the hill’s base and our house.
The days grew longer, and my sense of where I was in the morning and the year was quietly integrating with this play of light on the hill – until the empire interfered. We set our clocks ahead. The mornings got darker, and now my sense of light on the hill in relation to my journey through the morning is totally scrambled.
Artificially, culture corrupted experience.
***
The play of light, of course, continues. Daylight Savings Time does not vanquish experience – it just confuses it.
Light grows, little by little, since late December. By March, the growth of light on either end of the day becomes apparent. Even if you aren’t paying attention, you sense the grip of winter darkness diminishing, the sap loosening, morning and evening light increasing. And then, the light is suddenly altered.
The more than two-hour* gain of light since Winter Solstice remains, but an hour of it is cut out of the morning and tacked onto the evening. For anyone living intimately within the rhythm of light and dark over the seasons – which is basically everyone, conscious of it or not – the body revolts at this time transplant.
Every half-year, the artificial adjustment of time intrudes upon our integration with the natural rhythm of Creation. We not only set our clocks forward or ahead and lose or gain sleep or light or darkness or daytime or whatever happens as we go on and off Daylight Savings Time, we also anchor our hearts to the artificial.
Perhaps this seems a minor beef to bring up. Of all of the blood the industrial powers shed within this holy realm, isn’t Daylight Savings Time a relatively small intrusion?
Yes, but it’s triviality is part of what makes it so intrusive. That empire infects even such intimate experience is a sign of its full dominion.
For me, the twice-annual adjustment of time is a religious ritual, orienting us away from the rhythms of the holy in nature and toward the artificial. It’s a sacramental expression of the mechanical regime’s power to dissociate us from the very light of this world. Such dissociation happens in an infinite number of ways, and in terrible ways, but also in quiet, intimate ways, intruding even upon our varied experiences of light, of day.
Hundreds of millions of us, tired and bleary-eyed, awake an hour earlier, and hundreds of millions of experiences of light become disrupted, confused.
***
Not everyone follows such dictates. The Amish communities around us, for instance, ignore the whole thing, never changing their clocks, so that for half the year two times co-exist: Amish Time and Empire Time.
And then there are those for whom mechanical time itself does not determine experience.
In her book Ancient Futures, Helena Norberg-Hodge writes about the people of Ladakh, a Tibetan Buddhist peasant culture north of the Himalayas where “[t]ime is measured loosely; there is never a need to count minutes.”
“‘I’ll come to see you toward midday, toward evening,’ they will say, giving themselves several hours’ leeway. Ladakhi has many lovely words to depict time, all broad and generous. Gongrot means ‘from after dark till bedtime’; nyitse means literally ‘sun on the mountain peaks’; and chipe-chirrit, ‘bird song,’ describes that time of the morning, before the sun has risen, when the birds sing.”
The book was written in 1991, so I don’t know what it’s like there today. I do know that, according to scholar and author Vine Deloria Jr., “measured time which had little to do with cosmic realities” was a primary force undermining North American tribal traditions.
“It is debatable which factor was most important in the destruction of tribal ceremonial life,” writes Deloria, a Standing Rock Sioux, “the prohibition of performances of traditional rituals by government, or the introduction of the white man’s system of keeping time.”
Without diminishing the barbarism against tribal cultures, we can say something similar about anyone growing up in industrial culture.
Mechanical time, a system of relentless ticking numbers that you can set ahead on a whim, extracts us from natural time, so that the ebb and flow of light, the shifts in the night sky, the growth and death of plants, the phases of the moon, and on and on, have very little practical meaning to us.
We might notice the beauty of the changing forms of nature over a day or a year – we might observe them as poetically beautiful – but we can hardly imagine what it would mean for those complex, changing forms to shape our daily habits.
Even as I write these words, I’m watching the clock, realizing I need to leave in 10 minutes to wake up the kids to get them to their lessons and get myself ready to get to work on time.
Even when we notice it’s absurdity, Empire Time reigns – at least for now.
The best argument against daylight savings I’ve heard. Empire time. I will remember that.
I relate completely to confusion of light. I don’t wear a watch, but I still seem pretty bound by mechanical time.