“Night” is a place most of us urban dwellers rarely go.

Although the human eye can see a single candle flame from ten miles away, where are there ten miles of darkness without artificial light?

Most of us haven’t fully explored our night vision and its natural possibilities because of light pollution, the draw of our marvelous cell phones and computers, and the lack of others who know how to safely enter the night to show the way.

The Necessity of Night

Night is a necessary part of all life on earth.

For humans, we must be exposed to darkness in order for the natural clock run by melatonin to work correctly and for the bodily functions of cell repair and renewal to operate optimally.

Darkness triggers melatonin production which influences sleep, immune system activities, and more. Our organs, cells, and hormones “know” it’s night via melatonin.

Some animals and plants only come out at night, like the beautiful Moonflower that attracts night moths.

Night is a beautiful frontier that we can explore and learn from. And NightWalking helps you enter the night and become a part of it.

When you train yourself to see at night, you can literally see everything in your field of view, all around you. Night vision is not a metaphor; it’s something we can all experience literally via the natural peripheral vision function of the eye. Because the activity of seeing requires both the eye and the brain, anything we do with night vision that we didn’t learn as children is mostly quickly learned via an activity like walking at night without light on natural terrain.

Phenomena reported on NightWalks:
**Day vision dissipates as the sun goes down; colors fade to a beautiful greyscale
**Night vision takes 20-40 minutes to set in after the last artificial light or the sun goes down
**Curious moths checking out the group of strange humans who are walking around in the dark
**Night Hawk birds feeding while flying
**Glow-in-the-dark lichen that you can see from very far away, once your night vision sets in
**Plants appear differently and are easy to avoid

It takes most people 12-20 hours of NightWalking to be able to go peripheral and stay there at will.

This year during our Taos NightWalking class, another special phenomenon will be active: the Perseid meteor shower.

There are no words to adequately describe viewing shooting stars in the milky way in the beautiful Taos desert. You just have to be there to experience it!