From KCRW, this is nocturne.

From KCRW, this is nocturne. I was a Zen Buddhist monk during the latter half of the 80s. I left that position in 1990 and I you know did a lot of different things.

That's Clark Strand. Here are some of the things he went on to do after being a Buddhist monk.

He was the first editor-in-chief of the magazine Tricycle, the Buddhist review.

He founded the Green Meditation Center in Woodstock, New York.

He's written for the New York Times, The Washington Post. the the dark, ancient wisdom for a sleepless age.

His work draws from religion, spirituality, cultural anthropology, and planetary ecology, which is

to say he's one of those thinkers who can synthesize ideas from pretty

disparate fields to form new ways of understanding the world. He once founded a

study group called Coons of the Bible. It was an attempt to get a lot of different kinds of people together in one room to read and

discuss the Bible together.

You know, atheists, agnostics, religious people, non-religious people,

is yogis, Buddhists, Orthodox Jews and we you know we got all kinds of people showing up on a Thursday

night in Woodstock. The group found itself examining environmental issues through the lens of the Bible.

And so finally our reading of the Bible, you know, we weren't reading it for its religious

content at all. You know, we were beginning to read it as kind of a

document of where humanity went wrong, starting from the very beginning, and how we

found ourselves in this fix. According to Strand, part of this fix we found ourselves in has to do with our relationship to the dark.

More from Nocturne in a moment.

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