Waking Up to the Dark - The Black Madonna's Gospel for An Age of Extinction and Collapse

2022 Foreword INDIES Award Winner | Silver: Body, Mind  Spirit
2023 IPPY Award Winner | Bronze: New Age/Mind, Body, Spirit
Hidden in the darkness is an ancient secret suppressed by every aspect of our light-drunk modern world—there is a Great Mother from the bottom of time who has always guided us through perils and calamities. Now is the hour of Her return.
“An exigent, affecting summons to rediscover the night.”—Kirkus Reviews

Is darkness synonymous with ignorance and evil? Or is it the original matrix from which all life emerges, and the Mother to whom it returns? Higher and higher levels of artificial illumination have suppressed our contact with the numinous since the Industrial Revolution, with dire consequences for society, our planetary ecology, and our souls. This mystical testament weaves together paleobiology, memoir, history, science, and spiritual archaeology to lead readers back into the lost mysteries of the dark. Not since The Teachings of Don Juan or Ishmael has a book diagnosed with such urgency and cultural coherence the problems at the heart of modern life.

In Waking Up to the Dark, Clark Strand offers penetrating insight into the spiritual enrichment that can be found when we pull the plug on our billion-watt culture. He argues that the insomnia so many of us experience as “the Hour of the Wolf” is really “the Hour of God”—a wellspring of rest and renewal, and an ancient reservoir of ancestral wisdom and inspiration. And in a powerful yet surprising turn, he shares with us an urgent message for the world, received through a mysterious young woman he calls Our Lady of Climate Change (aka THE VIRGIN MARY), about the challenges we all know are coming.

About the author

Clark Strand is the author of Seeds From a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey and Now Is the Hour of Her Return: Poems In Praise of the Divine Mother Kali. He is the co-founder of an international, non-sectarian rosary fellowship dedicated to sharing the messages of Our Lady and the co-author, with Perdita Finn, of The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. For more information, visit wayoftherose.org.

Summary

2022 Foreword INDIES Award Winner | Silver: Body, Mind  Spirit

2023 IPPY Award Winner | Bronze: New Age/Mind, Body, Spirit

Hidden in the darkness is an ancient secret suppressed by every aspect of our light-drunk modern world—there is a Great Mother from the bottom of time who has always guided us through perils and calamities. Now is the hour of Her return.

“An exigent, affecting summons to rediscover the night.”—Kirkus Reviews

Is darkness synonymous with ignorance and evil? Or is it the original matrix from which all life emerges, and the Mother to whom it returns? Higher and higher levels of artificial illumination have suppressed our contact with the numinous since the Industrial Revolution, with dire consequences for society, our planetary ecology, and our souls. This mystical testament weaves together paleobiology, memoir, history, science, and spiritual archaeology to lead readers back into the lost mysteries of the dark. Not since The Teachings of Don Juan or Ishmael has a book diagnosed with such urgency and cultural coherence the problems at the heart of modern life.

In Waking Up to the Dark, Clark Strand offers penetrating insight into the spiritual enrichment that can be found when we pull the plug on our billion-watt culture. He argues that the insomnia so many of us experience as “the Hour of the Wolf” is really “the Hour of God”—a wellspring of rest and renewal, and an ancient reservoir of ancestral wisdom and inspiration. And in a powerful yet surprising turn, he shares with us an urgent message for the world, received through a mysterious young woman he calls Our Lady of Climate Change (aka THE VIRGIN MARY), about the challenges we all know are coming.

Foreword

• Authors will tap into ongoing Way of the Rose meetings and active social markets.
• They will also pursue the many indie stores who are carrying and selling Way of the Rose due to author events at their stores: Open Center Bookstore, NYC, Rainy Day Books, Kansas City, MO, Sagrada, Berkeley, CA, New Renaissance, Portland, OR, Moon Palace, Minneapolis, MN, Book Woman, Austin, TX
• Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge, MA, Boulder Bookstore, Boulder, CO, Collected Works, Santa Fe, NM, The Ark, Santa Fe, NM, Joseph Beth, Cincinnati, OH, Bookworks, Albuquerque, NM, Northshire Books, Saratoga, NY.
• National publicity campaign tied into the ‘trilogy’ of Way of the Rose, Waking Up to the Dark, and Now is the Hour of Her Return.
• Cross market to the Deep Green community, e.g Derrick Jensen. Both constituencies believe in an earth first philosophy and that the earth is headed toward ecological collapse, and that only a change in human behavior (rather than green technology) can prevent annihilation of species and human civilization. What Bright Green Lies is to the science of climate change, Strand’s books are to the spiritual side of the equation. 
• Galleys
• Social Media marketing---a strength of the authors and the deep green community

Additional text

“A celebration of the life-enriching—indeed, indispensable—properties of the night . . . Strand delivers a significant amount of experiential melding to existential thoughtfulness in this book about the sublime and elemental powers of the dark. . . An exigent, affecting summons to rediscover the night.”—Kirkus Reviews

“This book is small in size and mighty in spirit. It is at once a clarion call and a meditation. Sonorous, deep, soul-stirring, and profoundly comforting, Waking Up to the Dark is a rare book that will be pressed from one hand to the next with the urgent, whispered words: You must read this.”—Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion

“In a modern world flooded with artificial light, Clark Strand reminds us what we have left behind in the dark. This beautiful, haunting meditation is filled with surprises and lost knowledge. Read it by candlelight—you will never forget it.”—Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult America and One Simple Idea

“In this exhilaratingly original work, Clark Strand shows us that the key to enlightenment lies where we don’t want to look. It is hidden in plain sight, but we have to turn the lights off to find it.”—Mark Epstein, M.D., author of Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart and The Trauma of Everyday Life

“Breathtaking and revolutionary, a small masterpiece for a world that has grown uncomfortable with the darkness and a poignant plea to take back the dark as the Hour of God, as the great friend of faith, awakening, and soul nourishment.”—Gail Straub, co-founder of Empowerment Institute and author of Returning to My Mother’s House

“Wonder, solitude, quiet, intimacy, the holy—darkness holds these treasures and more. If we want to connect with God, argues Strand in this wise and compassionate book, we will ‘awaken to the dark.’ ”—Paul Bogard, author of The End of Night

“Revolutionary! This wondrous book reminds of a forgotten place, a place obliterated but our screens and shinning surfaces that catch the glancing light and hide the depths from us.” —Joan Halifax Roshi

Product details

• Authors: Clark Strand
• Assisted by: Perdita Finn (Foreword)
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 06.09.2022
• EAN: 9781948626729
• ISBN: 978-1-948626-72-9
• No. of pages: 150
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 215 mm x 10 mm
• Weight: 184 g
• Subjects: Guides > Spirituality > Esoterics; Humanities, art, music > Religion/theology > Miscellaneous; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Religion: general, reference works; RELIGION / Paganism & Neo-Paganism, BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Gaia & Earth Energies, BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Goddess Worship