- [Anne] Our ancestors knew the night in a way that very few of us do now, and it really wasn't that long ago. My own grandmother raising young children in rural Missouri in the 1930s didn't have electric light. She could see the Milky Way from her front porch. When we lit up the night and banished darkness, what did we lose as a culture? I'm Anne Strainchamps, In this episode of "To the Best of Our Knowledge," we'll make the case for reclaiming the night.
- [Announcer] From WPR.
- [Anne] It's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge," I'm Anne Strainchamps. There's an ancient tradition practiced every year by small groups of people in England at night. What time is it?
- [Sam] Well, we usually move it around 11:00, maybe just before. So darkness will have completely enveloped the land.
- [Anne] This is musician, Sam Lee. He leads nightingale tours.
- [Sam] We gather up and yes, we're doing it in company. There's a group of us, about 40 of us. We don't use torches. We do it in silence, and we walk in single file through the woods down these paths. It's a kind of, it's another world. However much you know the forest, when in the darkness, this completely different personality of the land emerges. People become like little kids. You know, 75 year olds are like giggling, tremoring with excitement. The air quality, the sound quality, the movement of creatures, the bird song that isn't there. Something changes. There's this extraordinary stillness. You become a not a modern person. You become animal. You know, if you switch the light on, you realize this is the easiest walk in the world. But what we go through, through actually having to outsource our trust is such a massive thing, because we as a species don't walk in the dark anymore. It's been banished. The dark has been banished from our lives.
- [Anne] You know, on the one hand, this sounds like such a simple thing, going for a walk at night, but in pure, uninterrupted, natural darkness with no artificial light anywhere, that is actually hard to find. Half of life on Earth happens at night. So what did we lose when we lost touch with the planet's ancient nocturnal rhythms? What did we forget? This hour, maybe it's time to reclaim the night. Welcome to the next episode of our series on Deep Time. Okay, so let me back up for a sec. This series on Deep Time is an invitation to explore life beyond the clock. To get past that giant secondhand in your head with its relentless countdown of appointments and deadlines to learn how to reconnect with natural ecologies of time. One way is to experience the night the way our great-great grandparents did in the fullness of the dark. That's what Sam Lee offers people. He's a folk singer and conservationist who runs an annual series of late night concerts where he and other musicians improvise in the dark with a famously elusive bird, the nightingale. Is not taking lights, so you don't scare off the birds?
- [Sam] No, not at all, they couldn't care less.
- [Anne] No, really? Oh really? Oh, I just assumed!
- [Sam] When we get to the birds, yes, I would not like light there. But for 95% of the walk, we're nowhere near the birds. So the light is, and the refusal of light is about an invoking of our other senses.
- [Anne] I would imagine it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. I mean, don't you get people saying, "No, just I need a little flashlight. So I can't do this without any light at all."
- [Sam] At certain points, if the walk takes a complicated moment, we will put red beam on, which doesn't affect night vision, but from the start of the walk, people are aching for it, because this idea of doing something that is kind of forbidden. There's nowhere in our society that allows us to find yourself in a place is so rare that we would do that. It's the final frontier.
- [Anne] To me, this sounds like such an extraordinary experience to have without the reason you're there, which is the nightingale. You are there to hear a bird that is legendary and there are only a few weeks a year you can listen, right?
- [Sam] Indeed, it's a momentary occurrence. Like a lot of nature's great wonders. It's a blossom, it's a flourish. It's there, it's a spectacle. It's an expensive moment in nature's year and it's for one singular purpose. And that is for the perpetuation of the species to find a mate. And all usual rules of conduct cease to exist. So a bird that should be hiding away invisible, suddenly doesn't matter. Allowing 40 people to come and sit right underneath you, fine. Right now I'm trying to find a female bird and me singing is the most important thing in my life. That makes it a wonderful opportunity for us to be there intimately part of that process, not interfering with it, not detrimental to it. That's a rare gift, 'cause I think we have a crisis in our belief system that nature needs to be left alone and we are bad for nature.
- [Anne] Mm-hmm.
- [Sam] I think this is a moment where we can go, actually we are part of nature. We are a bit nightingale. Nightingale is a bit human. And for us to not be there and to have a night as glorious as the ones we are granted in spring with the stars out and the blossom in the air and the twinkle of the stars in that tangible eruption of explosion of nature, to not be there and present, it's like the circus coming to town and you just not bothering to go, you know, the greatest show on Earth.
- [Anne] You just stay home in front of Netflix.
- [Sam] Exactly!
- [Anne] Yeah. So the thing that you do that is so beautiful that I wanna talk more about is singing with the nightingales. You've invited other musicians to come and sing and play and basically make music with these birds. What was the inspiration? What even made you think of doing that?
- [Sam] I was inspired from the moment I heard nightingales to go and listen to them and made it my annual duty to find one. And I never missed a year. And sometimes it was by quite by accident. I was like, oh my God! There's a nightingale. How lucky am I that I just, I'm at the right place at the right time. You've gotta be a bit of a night owl to have those encounters. But then I made a radio documentary for BBC, honoring the 90th anniversary of a very iconic moment, which was when the BBC did the first ever live radio broadcast. And it happened in 1924 with a legendary cellist, Beatrice Harrison. And she convinced the BBC to try out this new technology in her back garden with her playing cello with her nightingale that she'd discovered by accident, by just indulging in the spring.
- [Beatrice] I used to wonder about the garden, you know, was a cello at night. It was always a joy to me. And one night when I'd been playing for hours, I suddenly heard the note of the most heavenly bird. He used to sing in thirds with me. And it was such a joy, he used to twiddle about, well, he was always in tune with the cello, you know? And it struck me how lovely it would be if he could be broadcast. It was such a wonderful sensation, you know? And I had 50,000 letters.
- [Sam] Probably the first ever bit of viral media.
- [Anne] Wow.
- [Sam] It was to that time, like the iPhone or the iPod or AI all together. Never had media been able to transmit singular at the same time. And everyone phoned each other and said, "Get onto the radio, listen, listen, listen." Beatrice Harrison was Elgar's favorite cellist, but it was her nightingale concerts the nation made a date with. They were broadcast from her garden every May the 19th until 1942. That night, an ominous base note accompanied the nightingale and the BBC engineer recognized it as the drone of British bombers setting out. Thinking the broadcast would alert the enemy to the raid, he pulled the plug on the transmission, but kept on recording.
- [Anne] Do you remember the first time you yourself tried making any kind of music with the bird?
- [Sam] Yeah.
- [Anne] I have to think that was a life changing experience.
- [Sam] Absolutely, there are these, there are these moments in one's life and I'm sure we can all recall one, where something happens, a door is opened, you know it's a threshold that there's no going back, there's no unknowing of that experience. And on that night, out in the thorn bush, daring to make music with this master musician, you know, I'd listen but could respond. Never that what an impertinent idea. As the nightingale started to sing with us, this shudder, I remember this shudder of, oh my God, this is happening. I came outta that night outta that experience going, people have to experience this! People have to have to be here. As we sit there, listening to a gorgeous musician with this bird, and we are lying in the grass and the stars are above us, there's this sense of, this is what we've done for 99% of our evolutionary journey. And it's only been in the blink of an eye time-wise that we've stepped away from this. We've rejected it and thought we could better it. What have we lost in that? Stepping out of the scrub into those smelly, sticky-floored clubs and pubs and bars where we now gather?
- [Anne] We can't know. But do you think, do you suspect that people have been singing with animals for a really, really long time? Like prehistory even?
- [Sam] I think about this a lot and undermining your question, 'cause I think it's a really important question. Why do we ask the question that way round?
- [Anne] Hmm.
- [Sam] And not on the assumption that of course we've made music with the natural world, 'cause we were always part of the natural world. We've been entirely evolved in accordance through our ears and listening and communication has been a adopted from the animal kingdom. At what point, generation by generation, did we stop bothering to do it?
- [Anne] If you're just joining us, we're talking with musician and conservationist, Sam Lee. He's written a beautiful book about his nighttime concerts called "The Nightingale." And we'll hear more after this, on "To the Best of our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. I'm talking with British folk singer, conservationist, and activist Sam Lee about his nighttime concerts with nightingales. Sam is pretty well known for collecting, restoring, and sharing the ancient folk music of the British Isles, which is not like what we call folk music in America. It's a much older tradition, and when you hear it sung in harmony with the birds, it's like stepping way back in time. ♪ I ♪ ♪ Thought she was ♪ ♪ An angel bride ♪ ♪ Come tripping down ♪ ♪ So long ♪ ♪ Staying ♪ ♪ Country boy ♪ ♪ And modest to me ♪ ♪ She ♪ ♪ And daily lay by ♪ ♪ For my bride ♪ ♪ And by the time ♪
- The first time I heard one of your recordings. I mean, I got goosebumps. We're hearing some kind of cross species intimacy, but it's also, there's a kind of presence. You're both very, very present and I've puzzled over like, what is that? How do you do that? I think it has to do with the musical tradition you're coming out of, but maybe not. What would you say?
- [Sam] I'm really, I'm really touched that you hear that and it's not something that I've connected before perhaps, but the determination of a nightingale to sing in the darkness, in the silence, in the absence of anything else happening has a lot of, in one way, quite melancholic similarity to the art of being a folk singer. That solo lonely voice, you know, out there alone, folk music being a kind of declining tradition. And I've witnessed the age of extinction of the our old tradition bearers singing defiantly, those old singers knowing that they are alone and they are the last of their kind. There's a sort of tragedy in that and a beauty. Nightingales hold that, even though in many parts of the world, they're doing fine. In England, they are going extinct very fast, disappearing at terrifying rate. And I have such a familiarity with that, with being in the presence of those old singers in their 80s, sometimes 90s, singing these old songs, knowing that they are the last people to sing them. And I'm the last person to get to hear those songs. There's so many parallels. ♪ I'll take a boy inside ♪ ♪ And row him in ♪ ♪ My very own ♪ Grief is in there, rage is also in there. And I think this is where art comes into its true power. It's a transmitter of those qualities. It digests, it ingests, and it converts that into heat and love. There's so much to be learned from these birds.
- [Anne] Really, like what?
- [Sam] To speak from a place of absolute truth, a sense of reverence, a sense of devotion, of gratitude. You know, I don't think these are all necessarily just human qualities.
- [Anne] And what about musical qualities?
- [Sam] Well, as I say decoration, I mean, my God, and improvisation. The ability to, how does this bird choose what he chooses to sing? Every blast is a unique combination of sounds. We know there is a language within there. One day, and perhaps soon we'll be able to find this out, AI is doing an extraordinary job of deciphering animal language. But right now I am very clear that there is a conversation happening. What I observe in one bird over several nights with a different musician each night and a different group is the bird responds very differently. And I could tell you some extraordinary stories of when the birds have known absolutely what we are singing.
- [Anne] No, tell me! Tell me one, that's amazing!
- [Sam] Well, so an example, so the one that I really love was, one night there were two musicians that came. There was a woman who we'd booked, clarinetist. She'd brought a young protege who was a jazz singer, a girl of about 16. It was end of the season. And the nightingale had been terrible weather. And this night the birds were not being very cooperative, which happens about 3 or 4% of our shows. We probably have about one or two nights this happens of the 40 shows we do. And this was the bad night of the season. I knew where the bird was, he'd been singing the night before. And we were sitting there and we were playing the clarinet and I was singing and very little was happening. And then the woman passed over to her young singer and said, "Would you like to sing a song?" And she started singing Nat King Cole's "Nature Boy." ♪ There was a boy ♪ And as she sang this song, silence as we just beautiful listen to something. It was just magic. You know, there she was 16-year-old, she'd never been out the city. She was an urban kid, grown up in like the projects of West London. Never been out in nature before. This was a mind blowing experience. And then it came to the line, "The greatest thing you'll ever learn is to be loved and loved in return." And as she sang the word "return," the nightingale exploded into song.
- [Anne] Oh my God!
- [Sam] And the group gasped. And then tears just fell from our faces. That was it.
- [Anne] Wow.
- [Sam] What more proof do we need? That singing with the animal world with nature is bloody good for us. I'll tell you!
- [Anne] Yes! You hear a story like that and it just almost makes me wanna cry thinking of how much there is that we just don't listen to.
- [Sam] I agree, I also reconcile that with, my God. We have so many other wonderful things in this world that we surround ourselves with, which we have to celebrate. We have to fight for the arts as much as we have to fight for nature, the two go hand in hand. My great belief is that, you know, I'm living in a country where the support, the financial support, the valuing of our creative industries is so, it's so undernourished, it's so hobbled. And the same with our ecologies, with our natural heritage that it's so under supported and undervalued. And if the two in their similar predicaments can come together-
- [Anne] Yeah.
- [Sam] And be greater than the sum of their parts in moments like this and others that other people are doing and other creatives. I'm not the only one. I believe we've got, we've got a very strong case for change and a reevaluation of what we should be doing with the time we have within the situation that we are living in right now. ♪ And the falcon ♪ ♪ Oh, the falcon ♪ ♪ She's a big bird ♪ ♪ Wonders as she flies ♪ ♪ She asks us easy questions ♪ ♪ We tell her easy lies ♪ ♪ Go build you ♪ ♪ Go build you ♪
- [Anne] Reading your book, especially the end of your book was so heartening to me, because, you know, we've had two decades of watching climate crisis develop. So it is possible today to feel a kind of helplessness and despair. And what I loved so much about your book was making the point that, you know, it's not all down to politics and economics. Culture can make a big difference. What your line, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast"? That doing this, having this conversation for you, putting out albums, taking people into the woods to hear nightingales actually might make a difference. Do you really believe that?
- [Sam] Oh my God, I really do, I really do, Because I know that the opportunity for people to have a moment, just a moment to sense the alternative, they're so rare. And when they happen and they happen well, they impact so deeply that it can have a real profound effect on people. It's a collective journey we're on. We can't do this as individuals, and we can't depend on the state and government and policy at the moment. We know that we have to do this as a unified collective people movement. ♪ We tell her easy lies ♪ ♪ We tell her easy lies ♪
- [Sam] And I'll give a little secret away. My big moment for me is the kind of ta-da moment in the nightingales. Yeah, it's sitting with that bird and making the music or it's the walking through the dark. But it's actually in the storytelling around the disappearance of this bird and actually pinpointing what's really happening. It's not just loss of farmland in England, it's about global heating, Particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa that's gonna ravish their wintering habitat, rendering their migratory capabilities impossible. But it's about fossil fuels. It all comes down to fossil fuels. And the ta-da moment is going your pensions and your banking investing that you have in these horrific institutions that are not ethical and are propping up the fossil fuel industries, that is what's funding the disappearance of nightingales and everything else that they depend on. So there are highly powerful ways we can take ownership of our own accountability that isn't just about recycling.
- [Anne] Yeah.
- [Sam] It's activism. It really is activism. And I do it to create enchantment, but also to create the will for change.
- [Anne] So you said enchantment, and that's the other I think really important piece, because thinking back over the threads of this conversation, we talked about this kind of nostalgia and grief that there can be in the song of a nightingale in the awareness that this is endlng in your awareness of the vanishing folk song tradition that you're trying to restore. So there can be grief. And yet I think that you really have come to believe that joy is the thing that makes the change. And so I wanted to ask you just to close with-
- [Sam] Hmm.
- [Anne] This really beautiful dream you have, a vision of what things could be like. You call it the one day way, though I think we should call it the one night way.
- [Sam] Yeah, I do have a dream that if we were to make one sort of day/night in the year, a sort of almost like a religious holiday, the order has shifted the topsy-turvy, you know, that we did what we're not supposed to do. Nightingales could create an opportunity for us to go and be out in the dark at night. And that there was a ceremony, essentially a ritual around it that was not dissimilar to some of the customs or the Burns Night celebrations or some of those sorts of traditions that we have within our lives that we do because that's what we do. And this would be in honor of all those generations that did sing and play and revere nature and that we gathered as families or friends one night in the spring and we made it our purpose to step into the dark, to seek out a nightingale in one of their reserves or somebody's back garden. And we crept through the night and created a circle and a service. We kind of held a service for the nightingale. I call these things the nighting-galas, where we brought with us poems and prose, things that Shakespeare or Keats had wrote, or Mary Oliver or we had written, or a song that our grandfather used to love when he was alive, or granny used to sing, something like that. Bring in those magical things that we've gathered and they were shared with the bird. And in the way that I do really up close that the bird creates the auditorium, he creates that sanctuary and that that was an annual excursion and kids were brought into that and they were allowed to stay up late and we broke all the rules. And it was reverential and it was fun. And each year it would be slightly different. Sometimes solemn and somber. Sometimes it would be sexy and elicit and drunken and you know, just as long as it is done, as long as we do these things, we'll find our own way. That's a dream of mine. What an incredible scene. I can hear three or four singing over each other. Can I just say a little bit about just keeping our voices as hushed as possible? Because we're gonna get really close and it's very easy to scare them. Hello. In England we only have six, seven weeks of this song, such a short period, their mating song. But they've been doing this for millions of years. Humans have evolved listening to nightingales, you know, as one of the few night birds that will really sing consistently. They're the first artist. They're our sort of the midwife, the sire to us as language and song carriers,
- [Anne] Folk singer, writer, conservationist, song collector, and activist, Sam Lee. His book, "The Nightingale: Notes on a Songbird" is on many best of the year lists. And his most recent studio album is called "Song Dreaming." We head to Southern Appalachian next for more nighttime magic. I'm Anne Strainchamps. You're listening to our Deep Time series on "To the Best of our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. You don't have to travel to a national park or dark sky refuge to find marvels in the night, Writer Leigh Ann Henion discovered a deeper darkness than she expected, not too far from her North Carolina home.
- [Leigh Ann] I went out to visit a friend of mine, she's got probably 60 acres of undeveloped woods around her place. We went out and we walked down her road a bit, this gravel road in such darkness that I really could not see anything. I mean, it felt to me, I've been in caves with lanterns off and it was that sort of darkness. And so it was just fantastic to recognize that this darkness was possible to experience because really we've reached a point globally where darkness is almost a luxury.
- [Anne] Leigh Ann Henion lives in a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, but she's traveled all over the world in search of wonder. In her first book, "Phenomenal," she chased eclipses, followed reindeer herders, stood on top of burning volcanoes. Then she came home and discovered a world of nocturnal wonder, literally out her back door. She wrote about it in a new book called "Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Night." Charles Monroe-Kane was kind of enchanted.
- [Charles] One of my favorite living beings in the world are fireflies. Fireflies are the most awesome thing ever. And I thought I knew about fireflies, but like, nope, I do not know about fireflies. Go ahead, tell me about fireflies.
- [Leigh Ann] You know, this journey started with the magazine assignment. I had a beloved editor who said, "Is there something close to home that you've always wanted to experience?" And I said, "Yeah, I've always wanted to go see the synchronous fireflies of Great Smokey Mountains National Park. I didn't know what that experience was gonna be like. And I thought that synchronous fireflies were just gonna kind of blare, then go quiet, then blare, then go quiet. But what they actually do is when you're watching them in the forest, it's like watching the Northern Lights. They whoosh, it's like a stadium wave when you're at a sporting event. They kind of pass the light to the next firefly. So it's all of this is moving through the forest, it's gorgeous. I very rarely in my life had ever walked around outdoors without a flashlight.
- [Charles] Right.
- [Leigh Ann] Without any source of artificial light, and what was actually incredibly restorative was being in natural darkness for extended periods of time. I discovered not only synchronous fireflies, I saw blue ghost fireflies, which prior to this, even though I live in southern Appalachia, I'd like to think I'm familiar with this area. I didn't really understand what those two different species were like. And so blue ghost fireflies are neon blue.
- [Charles] Oh really? That sounds awesome.
- [Leigh Ann] Charles, wait more than the color. They're neon blue and they stay lit for 60 seconds at a time. So when you watch a blue ghost moving around, it's continually lit, basically neon writing in the night.
- [Charles] Oh my God, that sounds amazing.
- [Leigh Ann] Yeah, it's extraordinary. And so I started to understand the diversity of fireflies. I started to learn about light pollution and how light pollution harms fireflies. And when that story was published, people started emailing, reaching out, commenting about how reading the story inspired them to turn off their porch lights.
- [Charles] So not only does it change people, but it becomes a tourist thing, right? I mean, people come to that area now to see the different kinds of fireflies.
- [Leigh Ann] Yeah, culture sort of tells us that darkness is nothing. Darkness equates to death. And so to have an experience where darkness introduces you to a myriad of life forms that have been around you that you didn't even know were there, that is powerful and it's impactful. And I will say it's intimidating to go outdoors at night in darkness without any source of artificial light. But I did, I ended up finding these amazing species in my own neighborhood. There's an Appalachian species of glowworm, bright blue, glowing glowworm. And it was in a spot where I have driven by for 20 years, headlights ablaze, unaware.
- [Charles] I didn't know even glowworms existed till I read your book.
- [Leigh Ann] Yeah, so Charles, people refer to different things as glowworms. Sometimes they'll refer to firefly larvae as glowworms.
- [Charles] Oh my God, I never thought about firefly larvae.
- [Leigh Ann] Yeah.
- [Charles] Until right now it's like, yeah, okay, go ahead.
- [Leigh Ann] So in your yard, when you see those fireflies rising and you're having a magical experience, just know that those fireflies have been living in your yard through all the seasons for years and they've been glowing the entire time.
- [Charles] Wow, do the old timers that you know, grandma, great-grandma, are they like, are you idiot? We knew all this stuff was here the whole time.
- [Leigh Ann] I think about this all the time and we're really pretty recent to electrification. You know, my great grandparents never lived in a fully electrified house. We're so close, right? And so this is a world that our ancestors knew, but we've just almost completely lost connection to it. But we're in a situation now where darkness is the rarity.
- [Charles] We're afraid of the dark, you're not afraid of the light.
- [Leigh Ann] Yeah.
- [Charles] What do you think we're afraid of? Because it's very human to want to cover darkness with light.
- [Leigh Ann] It really does feel like there were times in the process of writing the book where I felt like I was attempting to turn the world upside down. Because everything is so focused on light as positive, dark as negative. It is so ingrained. It is just a bias that is absolutely challenging to counter.
- [Charles] Yeah, look, I don't grab the flashlight when I go out if I wanna go in the woods, I don't just grab the flashlight so I don't fall. I grab the flashlight, 'cause I'm afraid.
- [Leigh Ann] Yeah, I've been terrified at moments in the journey that I took in "Night Magic" for sure. Darkness is the unknown and we've been through so many years of so many unknowns.
- [Charles] Right.
- [Leigh Ann] That it was just absolutely revitalizing. It was delightful to consider that the unknown doesn't just hold dangers, the unknown holds wonders,
- [Charles] The unknown holds discovery.
- [Leigh Ann] Yes! I was really interested to learn that it's pretty well established that for large predatory mammals, in times of high illumination, so during a full moon, predators have much higher kill rates. They are more successful, and in times of lower light, prey are able to get away more easily. So it's pretty wild, because we think of danger hiding in the shadows. But in the natural world, oftentimes shadows are avenues of escape.
- [Charles] One of the things that was fascinating to me is you wrote that there were mammals that have evolved over recent times to become more and more nocturnal to escape humans and light pollution. That just made me feel bad. I'm like, oh man, really?
- [Leigh Ann] Yes, that is happening. And light pollution, it's just becoming such a large issue that I think it might be the next big conversation. You know, light pollution is changing the timing of trees losing their leaves for winter. They can't quite read the cues of longer nights.
- [Charles] Wow.
- [Leigh Ann] So we're really affecting basically every living thing on Earth with this artificial light.
- [Charles] How long does it take you to get your eyes accustomed? My brother and I had this thing we do where kids, we must have heard someone say six minutes once somewhere, that it could take six minutes in total darkness and have your eyes accustomed. Of course it was our bedroom, so it doesn't count. But how long does it take?
- [Leigh Ann] Well, after I spent a lot of time doing this and after I was searching for foxfire and glowworms and all these things, and by foxfire, I mean, bioluminescent fungi. So when I was out there looking for this, it's very dim. I mean, some forms of foxfire are extremely dim and I found it was helpful. I would go out at dusk and I would just wait. It's interesting if you ask people, how long do you think it takes for your eyes to adjust? I think most people would say six minutes. And I was shocked to learn that you actually gain night vision for hours.
- [Charles] Yeah, I bet, I thought it'd take longer, right?
- [Leigh Ann] And then I realized, okay, if I've never spent hours tending to my night vision, then I don't even know my full powers!
- [Charles] One of the things I'm gonna do that I really respect that had in the book that's interesting was a mini death. And I wanted to know if you could take your time and explain to us about having a mini death.
- [Leigh Ann] So when I went at the end of the book, I approached a primitive skills instructor, because after spending time with all of these different species, I started to recognize myself as an animal, as a fire making animal. Because humans are unique as fire making animals. And so I really started to become curious about that. And I wanted to trace artificial light back to its beginnings. And so I did that by learning how to make fire with the bow drill. I made fire with sticks and my bare hands. But so when I showed up to his house, I was overwhelmed. You know, I've been doing all this research, I've been on the road, like sure I've been spending time in darkness, but I'm still using too many screens at night. I still at that point, had not transitioned the lights in my house to amber and red lights. But when I got there, he recognized that I was a basket case. You know, I drove hours, I had all this stuff. I've got my son off to school. I mean, I'm dealing with like all sorts of things. And I got there and he says, "Light is a stimulant." And in order to move forward he suggested that I should sit still and be quiet and experience a mini death. And I sat still and I was quiet and I started to acclimate to the landscape that I was in. And it was a landscape that would go on to provide what I needed to make fire, to create light. And you know, it's interesting you brought this up, because I do think that we think of darkness as death, but darkness is absolutely crucial for life on Earth. And it's absolutely crucial for animals to thrive, including humans. And so we view darkness as death, but to experience darkness as a mini death, allowing darkness to be a season can help us really thrive in all times.
- [Charles] Do you feel the difference making darkness part of your life? Do you feel different?
- [Leigh Ann] I do, so you know, a little bit before bedtime, I switch over to low light situations. Whereas before, without even realizing it, no matter what time of night it was, I had just been rooms that made it seem like it was high noon.
- [Charles] Yeah, right.
- [Leigh Ann] Yeah, so I created situations that helped me sort of transition. You know, a sunset is amber, it's red, and the lights in my house go amber and red and then they go dark. And I have really found that that's been helpful for me.
- [Charles] You know, before we go, I have a last question for you and it's about fear. I went to a cabin with my six best friends. We go every year and I wanted to go down skinny dipping and it's about 200 yards to the lake. There's nobody around at all. Just my friends up there. They're all like sitting on the porch drinking. They don't wanna go down. So I go down by myself. Middle of the night. Must have been 11:00, 12:00 at night. I was afraid the entire time.
- [Leigh Ann] Yeah.
- [Charles] I did it, but I was afraid on the water. I was afraid on the walk. I was afraid back, I was afraid. How do you help us understand and try to overcome that fear of darkness? That's what I was afraid of, I was afraid of the dark.
- [Leigh Ann] I really identify with this. You know, when I started out I was very afraid. That's been tempered over time, but I'm still nervous, even in my own neighborhood, again, if I go out without a flashlight. But we say that we're afraid of the dark, but I think that actually we're afraid of what's in the dark. So to start knowing what's in the dark is one step toward better relating to the dark.
- [Charles] Of course, the knowledge of knowing what's there makes you less afraid, 'cause you know what's there.
- [Leigh Ann] It's just something that, once you start doing it, you're like, how is it possible that I've never done this before?
- [Anne] That's Leigh Ann Henion talking with producer Charles Monroe-Kane about her book "Night Magic: Adventures among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Night." This episode is part of our ongoing series called Deep Time, a collaboration with our friends at the Center for Humans and Nature, and with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation. And keep an ear out for the next installment on the Art of Time, including a conversation about this music. We'll talk with sound artist and acoustic ecologist, Alex Braidwood about Earth's natural alarm clock, the dawn chorus.
- [Alex] That's where this idea of deep listening or like embodied listening really becomes effective, because it is about presence. It's about being present in the place where you are. However you come to this, in those acknowledgements, that is what's the most important thing.
- [Anne] "To the Best of our Knowledge" is produced in Madison, Wisconsin in the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio by Shannon Henry Kleiber, Charles Monroe-Kane, Angelo Bautista, Steve Paulson, and me, Anne Strainchamps. Our technical director and sound designer is Joe Hardtke with help from Sarah Hopefl. Additional music and ambient recordings by Sam Lee, Leigh Ann Henion, Sam Goldberg, and nocturnal creatures from around the world. Until next time, we wish you adventure and wonder in the night.
- [Announcer] PRX.
