“Stop Improving Ourselves. Start Improving The World.”

At Helmsley Walled Garden, as the light begins to dim, something subtle happens.

Conversations soften. Movements slow. The sky - unremarkable at first - becomes a gradient rather than a backdrop. A group of people sit facing west, watching the day loosen its grip. No spectacle. No countdown. Just the steady turning of the earth.

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This is “Dusking”.

Not stargazing. Not meditation. Not quite a performance. Rather, a deliberate pause at the threshold between day and night - a practice revived by Dutch writer and cultural thinker Marjolijn van Heemstra, who has spent the past six years working on light pollution, attention, and our relationship with darkness.

Another dusking event takes place this evening as part of the North York Moors Dark Skies Festival.

But dusking is not, she insists, a festival activity. It is something older - and potentially more radical.

A verb, not a noun: The idea began with a word.

An elderly woman, who had joined a nightwalk, told van Heemstra that the fading light reminded her of something her grandparents used to do: skremelen - a Dutch verb describing the act of sitting together as day turned to dusk.

Van Heemstra had never heard the term used that way. She knew dusk as a noun, not something you could do.

Intrigued, she began digging through old newspapers. In the 1960s and 70s, she found columnists lamenting its disappearance. One even published a kind of “manual” for dusking, anxious that the practice might be lost. They were right to worry.

As people moved to cities, as work crept later, as electric light extended the day indefinitely, the shared ritual faded. The transition between day and night became invisible.

“Most of the time,” she says, “you don’t even realise it’s become dark.”

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For van Heemstra, dusking is about rhythm - and what happens when rhythm disappears.

“How will people know about the transition from day to night?” one Dutch journalist had asked decades ago. “How will they end their working day?” These questions feel oddly contemporary.

Without markers in time, without transitions we consciously inhabit, days blur. We wake in darkness, work under artificial light, move through illuminated streets, return to lit rooms. The planet spins, but we rarely feel it.

Dusking restores that sensation.

“It reminds you that you are on the planet,” van Heemstra says. “That the planet is spinning. That you are moving while you think you are not moving.”

The transition becomes something you participate in - a conversation between yourself and the fading light.

She quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: a ritual, she suggests, is to time what a house is to space. It offers shelter. Orientation. A sense of belonging. In a culture that rarely pauses, that shelter is vital.

In the Netherlands, van Heemstra says, there is growing discussion about an “attention crisis”. Young people struggle to focus. Screens fragment concentration. Productivity suffers. But she is wary of how the issue is framed.

“If you cannot concentrate, you cannot be productive,” she says. “So it becomes about improving yourself.” That, she argues, is too narrow - and too convenient.

“The biggest victim of our lack of attention is not only ourselves. It is the world around us.”

Water, forests, night skies - neglected because they are not attended to. Because we have learned to value stimulation over stillness.

Mindfulness, she says carefully, can be useful. But when it becomes a tool for self-optimisation - another way to produce more - something essential is lost.

“We have to stop improving ourselves,” she confirms, “and start improving the world.” Dusking, in this sense, is not self-care. It is civic practice.

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There is science behind her work. Research links excessive artificial light to disrupted sleep, weakened immune systems, biodiversity loss. But facts alone rarely change behaviour.

The deeper challenge, she believes, lies in myth.

We have inherited a story in which light is always good - progress, safety, growth - and darkness is something to conquer. Enlightenment over obscurity. Illumination over mystery.

When something terrible happens, she notes - a crime, an accident - the reflex is often the same: demand more light. Yet more light does not necessarily mean more safety. In open, desolate spaces, it can render a person more visible - a moving target.

Fear and risk are not identical.

Changing policy, she says, means changing the story.

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There is another irony.

In the Netherlands, one of the most light-polluted countries in the world, she has begun speaking to lighting designers who are now asked to create darkness - for private estates, for luxury developments.

Light was once a symbol of privilege. Now darkness is.

“It has become something for the elite,” she says. “That is perverted.”

In Yorkshire, where national parks are working to protect dark skies, the contrast feels sharp. Darkness here remains, in places, a shared inheritance.

But access is not evenly distributed.

As we talk, we reflect on the demographic at the Helmsley event: largely middle-aged, largely middle-class, walking boots and appropriate clothing. The “already converted".

If dusking is to matter beyond the already converted, it must travel. Into urban parks. Community centres. Neighbourhoods not typically associated with “dark skies” festivals.

In Amsterdam, van Heemstra has done exactly that - working with community figures, offering free places, reframing the practice not as environmental activism but as shared experience.

It takes time. It takes relationships. It cannot be parachuted in.

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Back in Helmsley, something else is noticeable.

Voices lower. People remain seated longer than expected.

When a greenhouse light flicks on nearby, it feels startling - brighter than it has any right to be.

Our eyes, unused to the dark, strain against it.

For van Heemstra, this is the point.

Darkness is not a void. It is a process. Even night is not fixed: the dark at 11pm is different from the dark at 2am. Everything is transition.

To sit within that transition is to feel both change and belonging at once - freedom, and homecoming in time.

The practice itself is simple: Leave the lights off.

Find a window. A garden. A park. Sit as the day turns.

Notice what fades. Notice what appears.

It is a small act. But in a culture that resists endings, it may be quietly radical.

And tonight, as the North York Moors host a further dusking event of the festival, that invitation remains open - not just to watch the stars, but to remember the threshold that brings them.