Dark Illumination is a collection of poetry that revolves around the simple truth that to enjoy the light we must first submit ourselves to the darkness. It is our journey that makes us who we are as individuals, as people, and as a society.
Brenna Strachan's entire life is ahead of her. And it's a long life, since she has joined the ranks of the immortal. She's returned to work as well and one of her first cases a rogue Witch, bent on destroying everything in their way, including her. Now, she must turn to her family and friends for help. But among those closest to her, is someone who has already betrayed the Oath of Protection. The words of the True Prophet are coming to pass and Brenna must deal with the betrayal and her life.
Light pervades the world, and when it is not light, darkness emerges and is combated by electric illumination. Despite this globally shared human experience in which spaces appear radically different depending on time, season, and weather, social science investigation on the subject is meager. From Light to Dark fills this gap, focusing on our interaction with daylight, illumination, and darkness. Tim Edensor begins by examining the effects of daylight on our perception of landscape, drawing on artworks, particular landscapes, and architectural practice. He then considers the ways in which illumination is often contested and can be used to express power, looking at how capitalist, class, ethnic, military, and state power use lighting to reinforce their authority over space. Edensor also considers light artists such as Olafur Eliasson and festivals of illumination before turning a critical eye to the supposedly dangerous, sinister associations of darkness. In examining the modern city as a space of fantasy through electric illumination, he studies how we are seeking—and should seek—new forms of darkness in reaction to the perpetual glow of urban lighting. Highly original and absorbingly written, From Light to Dark analyzes a vast array of artistic interventions, diverse spaces, and lighting technologies to explore these most basic human experiences.
An inspiring and beautiful collection of poems to give you strength, arm you for hardship, and remind you that you're always growing, from the bestselling author of Chasers of the Light. Tyler Knott Gregson is the original InstaPoet. With loyal fans across the country and all over the Internet, he breathes new life into this ancient medium and delights fans with his openness and honesty alongside his beautiful photography. This new book will be his first poetry collection in four years, and he returns now with a message of hope. In his elegant and simple style, Gregson will lift your spirits, keep you going when times get tough, and remind you of the inherent inner strength you already have within you.
What will become of us in these trying times? How will we pass the time that we have on earth? In gorgeously rendered graphic form, Light in Dark Times invites readers to consider these questions by exploring the political catastrophes and moral disasters of the past and present, revealing issues that beg to be studied, understood, confronted, and resisted. A profound work of anthropology and art, this book is for anyone yearning to understand the darkness and hoping to hold onto the light. It is a powerful story of encounters with writers, philosophers, activists, and anthropologists whose words are as meaningful today as they were during the times in which they were written. This book is at once a lament over the darkness of our times, an affirmation of the value of knowledge and introspection, and a consideration of truth, lies, and the dangers of the trivial. In a time when many of us struggle with the feeling that we cannot do enough to change the course of the future, this book is a call to action, asking us to envision and create an alternative world from the one in which we now live. Light in Dark Times is beautiful to look at and to hold – an exquisite work of art that is lively, informative, enlightening, deeply moving, and inspiring.
From the invention of the telegraph to the discovery of X rays, Simon has created a revealing portrait of an anxious age when Americans welcomed electricity into their bodies even as they kept it from their homes.
A resonant call to explore the darkness in life, in nature, and in consciousness—including difficult emotions like uncertainty, grief, fear, and xenophobia—through teachings, embodied meditations, and mindful inquiry that provide us with a powerful path to healing. Darkness is deeply misunderstood in today’s world; yet it offers powerful medicine, serenity, strength, healing, and regeneration. All insight, vision, creativity, and revelation arise from darkness. It is through learning to stay present and meet the dark with curiosity rather than judgment that we connect to an unwavering light within. Welcoming darkness with curiosity, rather than fear or judgment, enables us to access our innate capacity for compassion and collective healing. Dharma teacher, shamanic practitioner, and deep ecologist Deborah Eden Tull addresses the spiritual, ecological, psychological, and interpersonal ramifications of our bias towards light. Tull explores the medicine of darkness for personal and collective healing, through topics such as: Befriending the Night: The Radiant Teachings of Darkness Honoring Our Pain for Our World Seeing in the Dark: The Quiet Power of Receptivity Dreams, Possibility, and Moral Imagination Releasing Fear—Embracing Emergence Tull shows us how the labeling of darkness as “negative” becomes a collective excuse to justify avoiding everything that makes us uncomfortable: racism, spiritual bypass, environmental destruction. We can only find the radical path to wholeness by learning to embrace the interplay of both darkness and light.
Light and darkness shape our perception of the world. This is true in a literal sense, but also metaphorically: in theology, philosophy, literature and the arts the light of day signifies life, safety, knowledge and all that is good, while the darkness of the night suggests death, danger, ignorance and evil. A closer inspection, however, reveals that things are not quite so clear cut and that light and darkness cannot be understood as simple binary opposites. On a biological level, for example, daylight and darkness are inseparable factors in the calibration of our circadian rhythms, and a lack of periodical darkness appears to be as contrary to health as a lack of exposure to sunlight. On a cultural level, too, night and darkness are far from being universally condemnable: in fiction, drama and poetry the darkness of the night allows not only nightmares but also dreams, it allows criminals to ply their trade and allows lovers to meet, it allows the pursuit of pleasure as well as deep thought, it allows metamorphoses, transformations and transgressions unthinkable in the light of day. But night is not merely darkness. The night gains significance as an alternative space, as an ‘other of the day’, only when it is at least partially illuminated. The volume examines the interconnection of night, darkness and nocturnal illumination across a broad range of literary texts. The individual essays examine historically specific light conditions in literature, tracing the symbolic and metaphoric content of darkness and illumination and the attitudes towards them.
This volume contains the papers presented at the Scandinavian Conference on Image Analysis, SCIA 2009, which was held at the Radisson SAS Scandinavian Hotel, Oslo, Norway, June 15–18. SCIA 2009 was the 16th in the biennial series of conferences, which has been organized in turn by the Scandinavian countries Sweden, Finland, D- mark and Norway since 1980. The event itself has always attracted participants and author contributions from outside the Scandinavian countries, making it an international conference. Theconferenceincludedafulldayoftutorialsand?vekeynotetalksprovided by world-renowned experts. The program covered high-quality scienti?c cont- butions within image analysis, human and action analysis, pattern and object recognition,colorimagingandquality,medicalandbiomedicalapplications,face andheadanalysis,computer vision,andmultispectralcoloranalysis. The papers werecarefully selected based on at least two reviews. Among 154 submissions 79 wereaccepted,leadingtoanacceptancerateof51%. SinceSCIAwasarrangedas a single-track event, 30 papers were presented in the oral sessions and 49 papers were presented in the poster sessions. A separate session on multispectral color science was organized in cooperation with the 11th Symposium of Multispectral Color Science (MCS 2009). Since 2009 was proclaimed the “International Year of Astronomy” by the United Nations General Assembly, the conference also contained a session on the topic “Imageand PatternAnalysis in Astronomyand Astrophysics. ” SCIA has a reputation of having a friendly environment, in addition to hi- quality scienti?c contributions. We focused on maintaining this reputation, by designing a technical and social program that we hope the participants found interesting and inspiring for new research ideas and network extensions. We thank the authors for submitting their valuable work to SCIA.