Humans Surviving
I’ve been with wilderness survival instructor Luke McLaughlin for less than ten minutes when he asks: “Would you like to practice having a mini death?” The invitation catches me off guard. Luke notices. “By that,” he says, “I just mean, let’s sit and be still and quiet for a few minutes.”
Silence. Stillness. They are experiences of reduced energy. He’s suggesting that we should go dark for a minute. And I can see what he’s getting at: Reduced energy is, sometimes, what we need to go on abundantly living.
I’ve never been good at pretending. So just now, when he asked me how I was—after welcoming me to his field-and-forest acreage, located not far from Celo—I did not give the platitudes of convention. And, given that I answered honestly, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by his suggestion that we should pause for a minute. The briefing wasn’t pretty.
I have, over the past few weeks, not been sleeping well. I have also been consuming too much caffeine. I’m having trouble processing the massive ailments of the world on top of my family members’ needs, elderly to preteen. It’s been a particularly hard couple of days. I’ve been trying to support Archer, who is, as a twelve-year-old, being asked to do homework that requires having ten open computer tabs. His school system no longer issues books. No child in this county is required to feel the sensation of wood pulp under their fingers as they turn pages with necessary tenderness. Instead, their tactile reality is plastic keyboards that invite banging, white-hot screens that they’re rarely allowed to look away from.
All around me, people seem to constantly be talking about catching up, but catching up to what? I cannot seem to even keep up. Everything’s moving too fast. It’s too much. My mental load is tinder, set ablaze. Burnt out, that’s what I am. And yet, in what seems the antithesis of what I’m needing, I have come to Luke for a lesson in primitive fire-making. Despite my charred brain, in the process of attempting to reconcile with natural darkness, I’m seeking to build open flames. It doesn’t make sense, not even to me.
I wish I could say that my dips into natural night have proven to be a cure-all for thriving in a harrowing age. But though they have provided solace and insight, I still belong to a culture ruled by electronic technology. I’ve become more comfortable roaming around outside in the dark. But, indoors, I’m still drowning in artificial light.
In 2020, researchers from Monash University in Australia conducted a study that required participants to wear devices measuring their artificial light exposure at night the way nuclear plant workers wear badges to alert them to radiation exposure. In 50 percent of the homes studied, light levels were high enough to cut people’s sleep-inducing melatonin hormones in half. I think my household would have been among them. Going dark indoors still isn’t my forte. Then again, my species is one that’s always excelled at firelight making, whereas the ability to lower light pollution is eluding us—maybe because, until now, it wasn’t a skill we needed.
Ever since I spent time in Amy’s lush, history-inspired moon garden, I’ve been thinking about the lineage of artificial light in the human story. That’s what originally gave me the impulse to trace artificial light back to its beginnings. Firelight has shaped the human relationship to darkness, and studies show that it doesn’t disrupt human physiology the way modern artificial light does. Neuroscientist Randy Nelson’s research on how deeply artificial light disrupts our circadian rhythm—which regulates not only sleep, but also digestion, and body temperature, among many other bodily systems—has led him to suggest that though it’s the “paleo diet” that gets attention, we should be focused on “paleo darkness.” But what does that even mean?
Up until, well, pretty much yesterday, humans lived in small groups and spent their nights under the influence of handmade firelight. To go paleo-dark is to know darkness fireside. Low lighting is what we of the modern world tend to call ambience—often reserved for special occasions. But, for almost all our history, ambient light at night was the norm. Now, every enclosed space seems to carry the blare of big-box stores and casinos, which purposefully use lighting schemes to encourage careless decision-making among humans who are gambling.
Scientists have found that, for people who lived with preindustrial darkness, natural night was, in part, a waking experience, and I want to find out what I’ve been missing. I’ve enlisted Luke’s help because—akin to the way Amy likes to linger in the Victorian era—Luke is a part-time resident of the Paleolithic with a penchant for primitive technology. And fire-making is, by far, his most requested lesson. I first met him years ago at a primitive-skills gathering run by mutual acquaintances. There, he taught me how to use an atlatl, a projectile weapon that was a precursor to the bow and arrow.
My paternal grandfather was a target archer. My son is named in homage to him. I always thought I might visit Luke to build a bow for shooting, but, instead, I’ve come to learn how to use the primitive fire-making tool of a bow drill, which consists of the same bent wood and string that a standard shooting bow does, only utilized in a way that helps humans produce flames through friction.
Luke—who has a life-size raven tattooed on his chest and blue-ink antlers that curve around his neck—is ever mindful of where he focuses his energy, because, as a survivalist and hunter, he knows the true cost of replenishing what he spends. Right now, by necessity, he’s using most of his measured attention to settle me. I’ve come to handle fire-making technology. But, first, I’ve got to get ahold of myself.
“Firelight is a stimulant,” he says, “so we need to make sure we’re ready for that.” He directs my attention to an oak tree at the corner of his land. “You said everything’s moving too fast. What about that oak tree? Is it moving too fast?”
Okay, okay. I know. But, silently, I’m already protesting: A tree doesn’t need a computer science degree to parent a preteen! A tree isn’t asked to come up with a new password for every daily activity! Recently, a friend told me that she downloaded an app to remind her to drink water, and I didn’t even think it was all that strange—helpful, maybe. This is where we are: losing our senses to the point that we’re beginning to outsource our cues to hydrate.
But would a tree forget to drink? It’s not that far-fetched. After all, if this oak was under a streetlight, it might forget to drop its leaves. When a caterpillar is exposed to artificial light, it doesn’t always remember to pupate. Every living being on this planet seems to be on the brink of being overloaded with energy it doesn’t know what to do with. None of us—not plants, not animals—are alone in this.
“How are you feeling right now, in your body?” Luke asks.
“I feel like I’m full of static,” I say.
Static is light-dark-light-dark oscillating too quickly. It is its own sort of signaling, which anyone who has ever lived with an old-school, rabbit-eared television recognizes as: Connection lost. This is not working.
We walk past Luke’s rough-hewn barn to a picnic table littered with found objects: a sun-bleached possum jaw, an acorn. Luke does not speak for several minutes. He watches trees sway. I watch trees sway. The inaction makes me, restless member of a restless species, almost squeamish. I shift in my seat. A lot. Then, a little.
Luke’s massive dog, Fenrir, a black shepherd with pointed wolf ears, walks by. My hand grazes his coat, dark fur rippling under my fingertips. In the quiet space Luke has created, I start to feel my breath slow. The static in my mind begins to melt like snow overpowered by rain.
I can hear the trickle of a nearby creek. Shriveled leaves that have not yet fallen rattle above us. I did not expect fire-making to begin with a lesson in mindfulness, but most primitive fire-making instruction starts with an ecosystem introduction. Because, for our ancestors, wherever they roamed, light-making required ground-level intimacy with other species.
Finally, Luke speaks. “Let’s orient to the land you’re going to know for fire-making.”
He directs my attention to the spring-fed creek as a safe place to drink. He points out his house on the hill, where he lives with his wife, Luna. I express gratitude for this slowing. It is, he says, his natural tendency. “My energy runs around the speed of moss and rocks,” he says.
“Mine runs more the speed of a hummingbird,” I say. “Hawk moth, maybe.”
“It takes all kinds of energy to form a functional community,” he tells me.
It’s a generous comment that inspires me to admit that I’m confused by my impulse to make fire, since, even on a good day, I tend to be a live wire. But Luke assures me that, counterintuitive as it seems, he thinks I’m onto something, given my quest to better relate to natural darkness. “We only know warmth by knowing cold. We only really know life by acknowledging death. We only know darkness by understanding light,” Luke says. “It’s like yin and yang.”
When I was around Archer’s age, I wore a yin-yang necklace. I vaguely understood its black-and-white swirl design to be symbolic of balance. But recently, I discovered that yin and yang are, quite literally, mountains. Yin translates as: shady side of a mountain. Yang is the sunny side, a south-sloping hill.
In early Chinese cosmology, mirrors were sometimes placed on the yang side of a mountain for concentrating sunlight to start fires. And there were mirrors placed on the yin side to collect the dew that could put those fires out. Day was the ultimate yang. Night, the premier yin. What one shrouds, the other reveals. Without each, the whole cannot be known. Without both, there cannot be balance.
I have been walking the yin and yang of Southern Appalachia. But even now that I’m acquainted with both sides of these mountains, I’m not sure how to balance artificial light and natural darkness in my nightly life, within myself. That, as much as anything, is what has brought me here to time travel.
“You know, when people tell me they’re grateful for something, I can usually see pain underneath,” Luke says. “If they say, ‘I’m so happy to be connected to community,’ it indicates that they’ve spent time feeling disconnected. If you’re grateful for darkness and the biodiversity it supports, to me, that means it’s something you’ve been deprived of knowing. When you start pulling on one thread, you see that it’s connected to others. When you start loving and appreciating something about the environment around you, you realize the other side of that love is grief over what’s happening on a global level. It’s something I see in people all the time as they gain a greater awareness of nature.”
It’s true. As I’ve embraced natural night, I’ve had to simultaneously grieve it. There is no marvel under its protection that is not threatened. Darkness itself is in danger. And after spending several seasons in the company of fireflies and glowworms and foxfire, I need to meet myself as a fire-making animal. I want to understand why, after all my dark discoveries, I’m still struggling to let go of so many lights in my life.
Luke has asked me to bring a few tools, which I lay on the picnic table. They’re things I had to hunt and gather at a local general store that still sells hardware alongside barrels of peach candy and gift-packaged grits. In addition to the hatchet he suggested, I’ve brought a hand drill. In response to the knife request, I’ve chosen a fixed blade.
“These are things I would’ve suggested,” Luke says, giving me a high five. I take the gesture to mean that I’ve been cleared for exposure to firelight. He has, from the start, been considering my inner-outer energy balance.
He puts down the knife he’s admiring and says, “So, if you’re trying to make an ember, a flame baby, what would you need to have it catch fire?”
“Tree fibers?” I know this only because I’ve heard that poplar bark is a prized fire starter.
Luke nods. “Just like people, trees have different energy levels and survival strategies,” he says. “They have different techniques to fight entropy. Locust is dense, so it doesn’t break easily, which means it doesn’t allow bugs and fungus in much. Pine and birch use resin to resist. They give us what we need for fire just by taking care of themselves.”
He directs my attention toward the woods, where almost all the trees have dropped their leaves. I’ve come to think of leaf litter as biologic fairy dust that feeds the most wondrous forms of nocturnal life, yet common terminology refers to it as trash. “Do you know another word for leaf litter?” I ask.
“Humus,” he says. “That’s one I’ve always liked because it’s the root of the word ‘humble.’ It’s a reminder that I’m of the earth. I’m of this soil. ‘Humus’ is a grounding word.”
We enter woodlands with the creek gurgling at our backs. Even though I know it would be helpful to have poplar bark for fire starting, I don’t know how to find it, because I don’t know how to read the nuance of bark. In a warmer season, I would recognize the trees’ flowers, rubbery blossoms befitting this temperate rainforest. As a child, I would push their magnolia-thick petals apart with my fingers to find bright-orange markings at their center, each petal playing a role in making their circular designs whole.
Even if the trees had leaves, I would be able to identify them. But on the ground, they have already disintegrated, leaving little trace of their former selves. Luke points out the species’ arrow-straight trunks so that I might recognize them without their outerwear. When I understand the way their branches split toward the top of the canopy, I see them everywhere.
He urges me to look for fodder, but the ground is damp. Dry tinder doesn’t seem promising. “Making fire is learning how to live in the cycles of ecosystems. There’s so much moisture in this region, finding dry branches can be hard. Where do you think we should look?”
We’re already on the south-facing side of this mountain. I’m not sure how else to orient. Then, Luke points up, where limbs form a net above us, catching deadfall before it hits damp soil. There’s a wealth of what we need there, caught between earth and sky, where, by wind and sunlight, it’s been dried.
I untangle loose twigs from branches. “Remember, we’re not just looking for poplar,” Luke says. “This isn’t like going into the grocery store to grab something specific, like a jar of peanut butter. We’re going down every aisle to see what we come across, looking for whatever might be useful.”
He extends a twig so that I might catch a whiff. “Aromatic,” he says. It has the delectable scent of something that should be topped with maple syrup. “Look at the bumps on the side—what do you think this is? People use it as spice. That’s your last clue.”
“Spicebush?” I guess. Luke smiles. I’ve brought just enough language to start naming the world.
“When something smells, it’s an indication that it holds volatile oils that are often good for fire-making. Smells are those oils turning into vapors,” he says. “It’s an aromatic rising of carbon.”
Luke notices a locust post with sable-colored fungus growing out of its north side. A piece of it has fallen. He picks it up and knocks on it as Celts once knocked on wood to summon a tree’s protective spirit. “Tinder fungus,” he says, “If you light this, it will smolder for hours.”
Before humans learned how to make fire, we learned how to manage fires started by lightning. In some cultures, people spent whole lifetimes guarding and moving with bits of a single hearth. In time, humans mastered combustion, but fire was still valuable. It was valued. “To me, fire always has an element of ceremony,” Luke says. “There’s a reason we carry a torch at the Olympics. An everlasting flame is a common concept. Our human ancestors, in some parts of the world, they passed a single fire from one generation to the next.”
It was the ability to manage, make, and transport fire that gave our species freedom of movement. It’s how we’ve been able to make homes in blizzard-prone places, from Appalachia to the Alps. When humans migrated, this slow-smoldering fungus was a tangible bit of home terrain that could be carried in hand. Luke passes the fungus to me. It weighs almost nothing.
Tinder fungus was found among the belongings of Europe’s oldest-known mummy, the Ice Man, who was walking this world in the 3000s BCE. His body was discovered in mountains between Austria and Italy. Packaged with his fire-making tools, archeologists found pieces of fungus resembling the golden half-disc I’m holding. This fungus is not bioluminescent. But in human hands, it learned to glow nonetheless.
Luke is walking through the woods barefoot, unbothered by rugged terrain. When we reach an area guarded by bramble, he pulls thorns back so that I can pass. “I call these awareness enhancers,” he says.
Deeper in woodland, he lifts the limb of an evergreen tree for my inspection. “Know what this is?” Hemlock. We both recognize it as grief. Once, hemlocks ruled Southern Appalachian forests. Now, to see one is to know that woolly adelgids, invasive insects that topple giants, are coming for it. “We know it will have a shorter life than its ancestors, but some still get pretty tall,” Luke says. “Hemlock’s one of the best for fires.”
There are dead branches toward the bottom of the tree. They snap between his fingers easily. “Building a fire is about learning how to integrate into a landscape,” he says. Luke tucks more branches into his bouquet. I gather birch bark from the understory, silvery curls so oil-saturated they seem to shine. “Sometimes, when I’m building a fire, I feel like a chef, and like any chef who has good ingredients, I try to let them speak for themselves by letting the character of certain trees come through. They all have different strengths,” Luke says. He moves on, toes curling around stone. “Making fire is like following a recipe that draws from skills and awareness. If you’re a human who doesn’t know how to make fire, it’s like you’re a monkey who’s forgotten how to climb a tree.”
There are theories that suggest the human ability to build fires is a factor that convinced our ancestors—who once slept in trees, not unlike owls, and moths, and bats—to come down to rest in ground nests, the origin of beds. Fire is what allowed us to shed our fur and run faster than the animals we were hunting, since we could expel our body heat and gain it back through fire, outsourcing the regeneration of corporeal warmth.
Through cooking, we similarly outsourced the processing and digestion of our food, letting fire do the preliminary work of breaking things down, which ultimately changed the size of our teeth and the shape of our jaws. It was also around the time that we started using fires for cooking that our ancestors’ brains began to expand. Fire, as an organic extension of our bodies, shaped us into modern humans. And, through fire, modern humans keep shaping the world.
Dating as far back as 92,000 years ago, our ancestors used fire to alter ecosystems. In North America, the land European settlers viewed as wilderness had already been greatly altered by human relationships to fire. In California, where wildfire is an extreme threat, Karuk and Yurok communities have been prescribing human-created fire for more than 13,000 years, making small burns to prevent large disasters. But historically, the U.S. government passed laws to sever those human-fire relationships, in part because they have spiritual significance that settler-colonial culture denigrated. In recent years, the Forest Service has been working with tribal representatives to reintegrate land and culture, attempting to heal ecosystems by honoring traditional knowledge.
Fire historian Stephen Pyne has proposed that we’ve already entered the Pyrocene, a geologic period in which the human use of fire has come to a head, because humans have, in general, lost their working, ancestral relationships to it. He calls the Pyrocene “the fire-informed equivalent of an ice age” and suggests that humans’ “primary ecological signature is our ability to manipulate fire.” Only, with each electrified generation, it’s gotten harder for us to recognize that we’re playing with it at all.
Heat and light were, in the event of internal combustion, separated. We can no longer touch the stove to learn that it is hot. LED light does not, from its luminous point-source, emit heat that would act as a tangible warning. The enclosed realities of a lightbulb with an on-off switch gives our bodies no real tactile clues to the meltdown forces we’re handling. “With increasing frenzy,” Pyne writes, “humans are binge-burning fossil fuels… Combustion acts as an enabler.”
We want more light. We want more everything. It’s hard not to, because we are an exploratory species—and we’ve created an environment that gives us little ecological constraint, so we follow, follow our evolutionary instincts without direct, larger-world feedback. But, out here, things seem different.
I feel a tiny explosion on my arm. Then another. The sky darkens. I guard the tinder I’m carrying, and my skin is covered in rain splatter. “Are we still going to be able to make a fire?” I ask Luke.
“Hope so. It’s just spitting on us,” he says. “Rain isn’t a deal-breaker. It just makes getting and keeping a fire harder.”
When pine trees go down, their wood gets soft. But the places where their trunks bulge don’t break down easily. Luke points to a fallen pine with joints swollen as my late grandfather’s three-times-broken elbow. “The trees put more resin in those spots so they’re resistant to rotting,” he says.
Luke lifts a splintered piece of wood from the ground. Scent, forest green. “God, how I love that smell,” he says. “Sometimes, I burn this like incense.”
He directs my attention to one of the tree’s bulkiest parts. “People call these sections fat lighters. They’re one of the treasures of pine trees.” They’re not so much for starting fires as for sustaining them.
I study the still-standing pines around us, their knotty sections familiar. It’s like gaining X-ray vision into the interior of pines in my own yard—golden rings, held safe in all their cores.
Luke traces contours of the fallen log. Some parts are moss covered and others are webbed with mycelium. He says, “We’re going to take one of these fat lighters since it’s starting to rain, just in case.”
He hands me a small axe. In the shade of evergreens, I chop until wood loosens. I lift a splinter of resin from the forest floor. Against the gathering clouds, it looks like caramelized sunshine.
When Luke asked me how far back I’d like to travel into the history of human fire, I declined flint and steel, as it felt too close to industrialization. A hand drill, which is composed of only a baseboard and a dried flower stalk, sounded a bit too far in the other direction, so I settled on a bow drill. In the bow-drill process, a pencil-like piece of wood, known as a spindle, is twirled around using a bowstring while pressed against a wooden plank. And, wood-against-wood, this creates an ember through friction.
“A bow drill is physically easier than a hand drill, but it’s harder mentally,” Luke says. The mechanics of the bow outsource part of the brute force required, but juggling the extra parts can get complicated. Physically easier, mentally harder. This seems, to me, the definition of modernity.
The moving parts required of our lives are, increasingly, not mechanisms we’re holding in our hands, but the untold number of things we are forced to manage in our brains. So, rather than or in addition to physical strain, we’re all experiencing some level of mental hardship. Our lives are all about energy, expended and absorbed, without much tactile recognition that anything is being exchanged. More and more we outsource bodily tasks. We give away our senses. Through artificial intelligence, we’ve started outsourcing our thinking, as if we’re willing to numb ourselves out of existence. For Luke, making fire—and rewilding work, in general—is about reclaiming corporeal awareness.
“When I first got interested in earth skills, fire felt like a gateway for me to connect with ancestors, deep ancestors who came before agriculture. Their lifeline was fire, and I became obsessed with it.” He holds out his hands, palms up. “When you use your hands to make fire, you get calluses. When I started practicing with a hand drill, I could have bleeding hands, but I kept going. I asked myself all the time, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
It’s what I’ve been asking myself since I decided to act on this light-making impulse. But I suppose it’s like questioning why anyone would want to grind wheat to bake their own bread when they could buy a factory-made loaf at the store. Why would artists spend years painting with stone-crushed pigment when they could just use a printer? Why play instruments built from fallen trees when music can be created via computer programs? Because, without tactile processes, there’d be a lack of more-than-human communion.
Luke says, “For me, making fire was like channeling the power of my body.” It’s what led him to recognize that he had power in the first place. Actual energy to burn. And, once he’d mastered the fire-making process, he quickly moved on to other skill sets.
Daniel Fessler, an evolutionary anthropologist at UCLA, has done research that makes Luke’s obsession with fire, and my curiosity, seem less like personality quirks, more like vestigial instincts. Fessler has found that fire-making—a fundamental activity for our species—is a skill that has typically been mastered mid-childhood. In Western cultures where children are not given opportunities to handle fire at young ages, they tend to hold a fascination with it at much older ages. It’s been suggested that this might be why people like fireplaces in their homes, even in the presence of electric heat. We crave a primal relationship with fire because we’ve coevolved with it. We are still, as a species, intertwined with it.
Interestingly, since vegetation for burning varies so greatly around the world, Fessler’s research suggests that we have not evolved with specific plants, as hawk moths have with primrose. Instead, we’ve evolved to carry behavioral patterns that make us adept at concentrating energy with whatever we can get our hands on. In California, the process might require intimacy with boxelder and cedar. In Florida, sable palm frond. In Idaho, a fire-starting human would learn the qualities of sagebrush and cottonwood and yucca. The magic lies in the energetic interplay of humans and specific ecosystems. Light, like the makings of a fine meal, was once sourced locally.
As Luke compulsively worked a hand drill in his early fire-making days, he often found himself chanting to no one in particular, “Please be a fire.”
“It took me a while to recognize that mantra as a prayer,” Luke says. With almost every early technology that humans used to make fire, the process required moving up and down in a motion that’s used in prayer traditions the world over.
It took weeks for Luke’s prayers to be answered. It was only when he was too exhausted to disparage himself that pain yielded to woodsmoke. “The most important part about the fire-making process for me, early on, was how it taught me how to make fire without burning myself out.”
I feel the sting of a tear that does not fully form. Yes, this.
I might be a novice earth-skills student, but I’m a master of combustion. I start tiny, enclosed fires all the time. I imagine all the cell phones and televisions and computers in my house piled in my yard, logs on a blue-flame fire, concentrated. I’ve been getting my energy prepackaged. I cook in ovens where there’s heat but no light. I turn on overhead bulbs where there’s light, but no heat. And because the energetic costs are hidden from my senses, heat and light divided, something gets lost in translation.
Rachel Carson once wrote: “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” In her lifetime, the notion that night might stop coming after day due to human interference was not a pressing issue. The concept that summer might melt into winter, through climate change, remained a fringe one. The idea that losing insects and birds to artificial lights might cause silent nights wasn’t something that, in that time of relative darkness, would have been particularly worrisome.
Some moths have already evolved to avoid artificial light. In one study, rural moths from dark areas and ones from light-polluted cities were collected and raised in captivity. When released, it was confirmed that moths descended from those in the heavily lit places avoided artificial light much more than those from naturally darker places. After generations of exposure, city moths were no longer tricked by fake moons. Is this a hopeful sign, or a sad one? In scientific terms, it’s simply adaptation.
In almost every situation where extreme artificial light is involved, it makes our sensory lives smaller. Blue light can hurt human eyes in large doses, same as owls. But, with humans, harm tends to be a slower burn.
Recently, a study found that young adults who regularly use electronic devices triple their risk for myopia. It’s a global trend and researchers suggest that it was exacerbated by the pandemic, when screens became, for some people, their only portal out of four walls. More and more, humans cannot see at a distance due to the use of handheld screens, which potentially cause damage via light and the close distances at which we’ve been training our attention. Researchers suggest that by 2050, half of humanity will be shortsighted.
Luke has an entire fire kit tattooed on his arm, an artful rendering of a spindle stick and a baseboard. It documents some of the actual charred friction-fire holes he’s ground down with primitive tools pursuing light. On his knuckles, he balances a constellation of scars, collected in a variety of biomes. He can point to each like a map and tell you where the original wound was formed—many of them while fire-making. “Most primitive-skills people have hands covered in scars like these,” he says.
He holds up a sample baseboard that matches the one on his arm, so I can see what he’s asking me to make. The wood piece is the shape and size of a large soap bar. This is where the spindle will be braced for friction. “We won’t find heat if it’s too easy to move the spindle,” he says. “Fire is concentrated energy. We have to embrace the hardness of this. The energy we expend to make friction is what makes this process hard. It’s also what makes it work.”
Luke then shows me an example of a spindle, which looks like a large pencil. “This is going to help us concentrate our energy. It’s like the difference between wearing bowling shoes and stilettos. You’re walking with the same weight, you’re just concentrating it. As you spin this with the bow drill, you’re destroying the spindle you’ve created. You’re destroying the baseboard you’ve made. You’re putting your energy into an ember that you’re then going to put into your nest.”
By nest, he means the tinder bundle I’ve made of poplar bark, coiled under his direction to look like a tiny basket. He has a few basswood branches for me to choose from in making my own baseboard. “Like Michelangelo said of sculpting,” Luke says, “you’re just going to have to take away the parts that don’t belong.” He lifts a log from the forest floor to use as a mallet, showing me how to go through a battening process, using the log to tap my machete.
After my first few moves, he steps away. The wood shifts. I shift. “You’re doing well,” he says. “Nice correction.” In my hands, the branch is reshaping. With my mallet, like a sculptor, I keep tap, tapping. Next, I need a spindle. I follow the same process as with my baseboard.
Before long, I’m whittling. Basswood shavings gather until it looks like I’m sitting in a snowdrift. “I think that’s enough,” Luke says. “Maybe even a little too much.”
I hand my work over for inspection. He presses his thumb against the spindle. It snaps. My creation would not have survived the pressure of a bow drill turning it with string. “All that work,” he says, shaking his head. “But, sometimes, this is just what happens.”
He offers me a spindle from his personal collection. It feels a little like cheating to accept it. But the sun is going down.
One end of the spindle is pressed against the baseboard, where it will gather heat. The other is braced against a socket piece. He twists the spindle into the bowstring with a flip, then he starts moving it like a saw, spindle grinding against the board. “Once it’s smoking, there’s always a chance you have an ember,” he says.
People with upper body strength just push down on the bow drill, but he’s twisted his arm around his leg in a stance he uses to teach children and adults who, like me, lack muscle. To make it less intimidating, Luke suggests that I think of the position like a yoga pose. But I am not a yogi.
Still, I copy his pretzel posture: Spindle in hole. Hand under my kneecap. Foot against board. Bow in my hand, sawing. Forward and back, as if against a stringed instrument.
“Once,” Luke says, “I taught bow drill to a cello player. They were like, ‘Oh, I know how to do this.’” I am not a cello player. But I am soon holding my bow drill steady.
“You’re doing great,” he says. “You don’t have to do anything other than what you’re doing.” Smoke begins to rise in wisps delicate as cotton thread. “Keep breathing,” Luke says.
The reminder is helpful. Bow forward inhale. Bow back exhale. They are long strokes. I take larger breaths. My bowstring is inching upward. Luke leans in to adjust it as I saw away. “You’re almost there!” he says. But my muscles are tired. My energy, dissipating.
I’ve started to think about the complexity of what I’m doing. The migration of energy from my hands to my mind has caused me to favor my upper body, as if my brain alone could do this. I’m no longer putting my weight into things. I lose contact, going from a woman who has the whole world backing her up to an individual with no grounding. Within seconds, the promise of an ember is lost. My spindle rolls right out of my bowstring.
“Try again?” Luke suggests.
“I’m not very good at working a bow drill,” I say apologetically.
“It’s almost like you’ve never done this before,” he says. “You’re actually doing very well for your first time. But how does it feel, not immediately being good at something?”
“It makes me want to laugh,” I say. “That’s what I tend to do when my attempts seem ridiculous.”
“There are worse ways to react,” Luke says.
I try again. Same motion, same breathing pattern. Success.
There’s smoke coming from the board. But when Luke moves in to transport the ember to my tinder bundle, it falls to the ground. Soil claims my spent energy—light, buried like a seed.
“I almost never lose an ember,” he says. “I think it’s because you were meant to do it, but I stepped in. Next time, I’ll step back.”
I thread the spindle. I flip my bow. But when I start to work, the spindle does not catch on my bowstring. Instead, it launches like a dull-tipped arrow, nearly hitting Luke in the face.
I begin again, but my baseboard groove is spent. I need to make another with my knife’s tip. I reach for my blade. But I’m careless. I cut my finger. Crimson wells on my pointer. “Good thing you told me about the scars,” I say, cradling my hand. “Makes this feel more like initiation than failure.”
“Accidents happen fast,” Luke says. “You need to settle your mind. In the meantime, we better find something to slow the bleeding.”
His first instinct is to look for a coagulating plant. Mine is to find a plastic Band-Aid. I’m new to deep-time living.
I press my finger against the black shirt I’m wearing and rummage in my store of supplies for a first-aid kit. When I return to my fire-making tasks, fully bandaged, Luke tells me that he’s concerned about the fading day. Making fire in darkness is not easy for beginners, especially with an injury. “Fire has been with us for thousands and thousands of years,” Luke says. “It will be there for you, if not today, tomorrow. You can keep practicing. I don’t want to rush you, but the sun is setting.”
He’s close to calling this session. My finger throbs, but I do not want to give up. I take my position. I get into my baseboard groove. Slow is steady, steady is fast. But when I’m close to creating light, I lean in. My energy is, again, lost to the wind.
“What happened?” Luke says. “I saw you try to power through there at the end. You were like: ‘I’m going to will this into being!’”
“Yeah,” I say, “that’s my MO.”
“Being able to power through is not a bad trait,” Luke says. “And I bet it works for a lot of things. But it won’t work for this. This is about finesse.” It is about a balance of exertion and rest.
I think of Luke bowing with his hand drill, praying all those years ago, his hands bleeding as my hand is now. I feel a dull ache in my torso. “I’m working muscles I didn’t even know I had,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says, “a bow drill works your core.”
By necessity, I accept that I might not be able to do what I set out to do. I give myself grace. It’s what I’ve been needing. It feels like what the world has been lacking, everyone and everything seemingly rubbing against each other, bones with no soft tissue between. Friction fires, all over the place.
I release expectation. I promise myself forgiveness, even if I fail. All I have to do is breathe, I tell myself. If I get out of the way, my body will do this without me having to think. All I have to do is breathe. This chant is, oddly enough, the same one that got me through a twenty-one-hour labor, years ago. The core pain I’m experiencing with this bow has tinges of the ones that brought Archer into being.
The chaos of my mind migrates to my hands. The concept of putting my energy into something has, in this moment, literal meaning. I am supported by the forest behind me. I’m held by the earth below me. I gain confidence. Then my spindle cracks. Luke has another in his fire kit.
“Start again,” he says. I’m close. We can both feel it.
The sun is setting. I flip the spindle into string. I cup my bleeding hand around wood and begin again. The spindle’s whirl makes music, a hum I have not noticed until now. In and out, I breathe. Back and forth, I bow. Finally, a thread of smoke.
“Keep going,” Luke says. “Keep breathing. You’re almost there.”
In an instant, something shifts between skin and blood and bone. The spinning of my abstract mind fully transfers into the spindle’s wooden whirl. But it is hard to sustain. I fall to the ground, exhausted. But Luke’s keeping watch. “I think you’ve got something,” he reports.
Soon, it’s confirmed: An ember has been born. The smell of woodsmoke, unmistakable.
We stare into a tiny mound of charred wood dust, the leavings of my labor. To give the ember oxygen, Luke tells me to wave my hand over it, as I once did the wings of a dying moth. Then, under Luke’s instruction—as I once blew against that cecropia’s head—I exhale, gently. In the mound of charred wood dust, a crimson glow appears.
“Yes! You’ve got an ember!” Luke exclaims.
He hands me the wood-fiber nest spun in preparation and says, “This time, you should do the transfer.” I flip my board so that the glowing ember falls into the darkness of my tinder nest.
When my basswood-mingled energy meets poplar bark, the ember glows. The ember grows. Illumination dims and rises, just like the lantern of a firefly. From a distance, it might very well be mistaken for one. I laugh at this confluence, the interplay of all that has led me here, full circle. I have fire in my belly. It is an observable entity. And it looks just like the living lanterns that inspired my night-loving journey.
Luke instructs me to pinch the kindling. “As the ember gets bigger,” he says, “you can progressively blow a little harder.”
I hold my tinder bundle close and blow. The ember fades and shines. The languid interplay of dark-light-dark-light tells me when and how deeply I need to breathe. I follow the ember’s lead. My breath, stronger. Its glow, larger.
Luke has moved into darkness to prepare a hearth site. Nest in hand, I follow the shape of his voice. And, just as I reach him, the nest ignites. “There it goes!” he says.
Flames consume bark and joy bursts through my body. My fingers are protected only by a tuft of tinder. It’s time for me to release this inner light turned outer fire, or else my skin will singe.
I put the bundle on the ground. Luke and I sit on opposite sides of the burn. Me to the north. Luke to the south. Between us, fire, a dancing energy mount. “You made this,” he says.
It is not only a physical accomplishment. It’s something in the realm of spirit, for which there is no spoken language, only the poetry of what’s been lived. This is a chemical reaction; it is the divinity of creation. On the ground, fierce petals of yellow bloom from the tips of deadwood twigs. In the air, ghost limbs branch out as smoke, outlines of what this firewood was before. I can taste a hint of spicebush on my tongue, ethereal communion.
Fireflies can make light inside of their bodies—and we can make light outside of ours.
If other animals studied humans the way we study them, this would be our notable feature.
Maybe the wonder we have when we look at fireflies is some recognition that they embody our hidden powers, the fire we all, instinctively, yearn to create soon after we enter this world—each of us, legacy of fire-making ancestors. Every human who exhales has the potential to breathe fire. We are stardust, reshaped into creatures capable of burning whole planets. We know this, practically. But the sensation of enacting this evolutionary behavior has proven powerful beyond imagining.
“This is my fire,” I blurt. It is not a declaration of ownership. I am this fire; this fire is me. I recognize my energy in the flames. This light’s combustion was not hidden. Its catalyst was me.
I’ve lived out the cost of human-made light, and I am grateful for the struggle. This process has made me appreciate light in a way I never could have if it had arrived easily, just as I’ve grown to appreciate darkness as important in ways that light pollution attempts to hide. When I share this with Luke, he nods. “That cello player didn’t seem very impressed when they made an ember with their first go. They were like, ‘Okay, what’s next?’”
Luke gives me a solemn look. “How do you feel in your body now?” he asks.
I’m sitting beside flames, yet I feel internally cooler. There is no stiletto-heel point of blue light pressing against my brain. I no longer feel like a container full of static electricity.
The rain never really came. The sun has since gone away. In my body, in the world around me, dark and light have gently been parsed out. They both have a place. And I am sitting in the space between.
My fingers burrow into dark ground—like a salamander finding home, like tree roots stabilizing. It’s been hours since I took in artificial light, and I’ve expelled my bodily heat on the shady sides of mountains. I’ve channeled my human power into the peeling of bark, the friction of sticks.
“I feel like an underground aquifer that’s rising through the eye of a spring,” I say.
“That sounds nice,” Luke replies, even-keeled, as always.
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of a bat seeking roost in Luke’s barn. We are approaching Halloween, referred to by some as a thinning of the veil between past and present, living and dead. This is, in Appalachia, still the traditional season of campfires and storytelling. Luke asks if there’s anything I’d like to say, in ode to this fire-making occasion. He tells me that people tend to talk about their ancestors after making their first fire. Luke has always found the impulse poignant since so many cultures refer to fire with their respective terms for “grandfather.”
The mention of ancestors makes me think of the work of archeologist Holley Moyes, who has, for years, been looking into how the dark zones of caves came to be sacred in religions the world over. The Central American ritual caves she’s focused her career on are still used today by people who believe that spirits are more willing to communicate with the living under the protective cover of darkness.
Homo erectus and Neanderthals used fire. Our ancient ancestors have been pushing back darkness since before we were human, possibly for two million years. And, though early humans did not live in dark zones, our species has long turned to the darkest areas of caves for spiritual rites. The cross-cultural tendency is so prevalent, Moyes started wondering if the presence of darkness itself had something to do with the practice.
“Mother, father, uncle, grandfather—they’re all roles, categories we create to assign behaviors. They’re all in our heads. They’re things that, in a culture, are agreed on, and they’re an example of what’s known as transcendent imaginary thinking,” she’s said, suggesting that this ability is part of what makes us human, Paleolithic to present.
The more time Moyes spent in caves, the more she started to suspect darkness played a role in how humans perceive and interact with environs. And she started to wonder if, in modern humans, darkness might still shape thinking. So she enlisted the help of cognitive scientists to conduct a small-scale study.
Participants were divided into two rooms: one well lit, the other dark with a small source of illumination. They were asked things like: If, on the anniversary of your grandfather’s death, you woke to the smell of his cigar smoke, would you be more inclined to think that it was a coincidence, or would you think it might be a sign letting you know that his spirit was all right?
In the well-lit room, more people chose rational explanations. In the darker room that mimicked fireside environments, people were far more likely to choose supernatural explanations. “Darkness,” Moyes says, “has been an active agent in the development of human spirituality, and it plays a role in how we feel, think, and interpret the world.” In other words, darkness might help us reach the depths of our humanity.
“Although we avoid darkness—it makes us uncomfortable, it frightens us—we also seek it out, because it frees our minds from the constant barrage of data that demands our attention every minute of every day,” she says. “Darkness allows us to re-create our world and think about ourselves in a different way. Darkness allows us to transcend the ordinary and maybe even find the divine within ourselves.”
How wild to think that we might glimpse twilight scenes as enchanted because, just as our sense of smell rises at dusk, darkness activates the potency of our own imaginations. Our minds, opening like the petals of jasmine tobacco, dilating like our widening eyes, so that we might be able to inhabit the infinite possibilities of evening. All those seasons ago, among the fireflies of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, when that stranger called out to ask if I was a magical creature, it was likely a sign that, in fading light, she was blooming into her own magical thinking.
Not much is known about how firelight has altered human culture through the ages. But Polly Wiessner, an anthropologist who has spent a great deal of time with modern hunting-and-gathering Ju/’hoansi bushmen in the Kalahari started to wonder, as Moyes did, if there was something about darkness that shapes the way cultures have developed and, to some extent, still function. “For ninety-nine percent of human evolution,” she says, “in darkness, by dim firelight, is how our ancestors lived.”
Over the course of unrelated research, she’d collected twenty years of conversational recordings in the Kalahari, with notes about which took place in daylight and which took place at night, fireside. Taking inventory, she found that almost everything talked about in daylight fell into a few categories: complaints, criticisms, gossip, and economics. But after dark, nearly all conversations were dominated by storytelling: tales of adventure, local flora, ancestors, and deities that might be called on to help the living. Criticism, complaints, and economic conversations were almost nonexistent. After dark, there was a change of emotional spectrum, a willingness to consider connections to spirit worlds where perceived boundaries disintegrated. It’s where singing and dancing and bonding tended to happen, where daytime arguments found reconciliation. It was in darkness that healing rites were enacted and food was shared.
I think most people would agree that campfire talks tend to take on a different tone than conversations in fluorescent-lit rooms. And darkness itself might be an active agent in that variation. As it is, modern humans spend most waking hours under artificial light, stuck in daylight conversations. We are, increasingly, leaving less room for big questions. Maybe because the ones too large for finite answers are the ones that we, as humans, evolved to explore in shadows.
Of course, the bushmen who participated in Wiessner’s study are also modern humans, from modern cultures that are continually shape-shifting, as all cultures do. And their fireside ways of being, though still in practice, are now under threat from geographically distant cultures that have been commandeered by daylight thinking almost completely.
In recent years, Wiessner reports that cell phones have begun to surface among Kalahari teenagers, even though satellites have not yet brought reliable data services. There will undoubtedly be logistical benefits when they do. But—even as someone who lives in a place where cell phone coverage is not a given—I suspect that there will also be little-considered costs, starting with the light pollution of satellite constellations overhead; progressing to: who knows? It’s only now that humans have started formally looking into how the interplay of darkness and light might alter human thinking.
Already, the process of severing culture from natural night has started to change things in the Kalahari. It’s something Wiessner has only noticed recently, included in her research as a footnote. Even though they’re not often within cellular range, Kalahari teenagers have already started preferring the concentrated blue light of their phones to the relaxed red spectra of firelight.
Night after night, they walk away from their elders, away from traditional knowledge, away from stories that encode the wisdom of local ecosystems. They wander deserts, alone, cell phone flashlights pointed not at the path ahead, but at their own faces, searching for signals that they never receive. And, just as I see myself in this fire, I recognize myself in them.
There is an animal behind me. I hear the crunching of leaves, four rustling feet. Luke raises a finger in the air, signaling that he has heard it, too. “Deer, maybe?” I suggest.
“I think it’s Fen,” Luke says, just as the dog leaps into the ring of light we’ve created. Fenrir chooses to sit beside me, ears perked. He shifts his weight until he’s firmly pressed against my side. I put an arm around him, and, together, we stare into the fire.
“Do you want him to move?” Luke asks.
“No, I love him,” I say. And though we’ve just met, I do. It’s my usual reaction to dogs in general. Fenrir seems to like me, too, though he might not have been drawn to me so much as the fire.
Many predators, including undomesticated canines, avoid fire. Humans are the only predators who produce it, which might be why we have, for so long, felt shielded by it. And dogs are wolves who, domesticated by humans, acclimated to warming themselves by the night-light associated with our species. It’s extraordinary to think that Fenrir and I have been brought together tonight by the millions of hearth fires and interdependencies that have connected our kind.
Luke named Fenrir after the hulking black wolf of Norse mythology. For a long time, Fenrir, the wolf, is said to have lived in harmony with the gods. He was well on his way to becoming domesticated—that is, a companion rather than an adversary. But as he grew larger, the gods became terrified of his power. He was too large, too unwieldy, so they had an impulse to contain and control him. They began pushing him into submission rather than working in collaboration. And, through their imprisonment and abuse, they manifested the very monstrous force they’d feared. When Fenrir, the wolf, could take no more of their pressure, one evening, at dusk, he reared back and broke loose of the chains holding him in, leading to the mass destruction of his captors.
Fenrir, the dog, gets up to pad around again, settling behind me. His breath steady. The flames in front of us rising and falling.
I mention to Luke that I’d like to keep practicing with a bow drill, and he offers to send me home with the borrowed pieces of his personal kit. But not without a warning. “You know what ‘sophomore’ means in Latin? ‘Wise fool,’” he says. “Practice. But be careful with it.”
I’m a human who has gained a little skill, without enough experience for it to have ripened into wisdom that matches my power. This makes me particularly dangerous.
Luke grabs a branch from the pile of fodder we’ve gathered, and I realize it’s something he’s been doing regularly. I’ve been chatting, ruminating, pulling my energy back into my mind, neglecting the nuanced reality of participating in the living world around me.
When I realize he’s been doing all the work of feeding the fire, I’m embarrassed. Luke suggests that I shouldn’t be. It’s a tendency he notices in almost all new fire-making students. Fire-making takes muscle. But tending is one of the hardest things to teach, because it requires sustained awareness of energy exchange. “We’ve gotten used to enclosed heat and light. We’ve gotten used to stoves and lightbulbs and microwaves,” he says. “They don’t grow. They don’t shift or need constant attention. They don’t breathe. They don’t bring to attention the reality that you have to give to receive, but a fire does that naturally.”
Our conversation roams freely, until we both start yawning. He offers for me to camp on his land, but I tell him that I need to head home. That’s when he asks what I’d like to do with my fire. And it’s a question that, strangely enough, I did not see coming.
I’ve been so focused on producing light that I’ve given no thought to how I might invite darkness back. I overlooked the fact that, in making fire, I simultaneously created responsibility. This, even though it is darkness that brought me here. This, even though it is darkness that I’ve come to honor, in a sense.
Subconsciously, I guess I thought I’d just let the flames wilt, smoking themselves to death. Or that I’d douse things with water when it was time to move on. But now that I’ve come to know firelight with such intimacy, these choices seem neglectful—disrespectful of all this ecosystem has given, dismissive of my own energy.
How extremely human of me to overlook light’s ending in favor of its beginning. For the duration of our species’ evolution, we’ve needed to know how to build and sustain fires to survive life on this planet. Even now, creating and controlling fire is, in some capacity, the basis of our most advanced technologies.
We look to light to save us, because, until now, it almost always has. Evolution has coded us to be attracted to fire, to cultivate it. And now that it’s time to turn down artificial light and the heat of all our internal combusting, we’re collectively struggling to figure out how. Because moving toward darkness, rather than light, requires an about-face reversal of the human story. It requires flip-the-script storytelling. And, at this critical juncture in history, natural night needs human help to regain its rightful place on Earth, as well as in the heavens.
I cannot save the planet from light pollution. But I’m starting to understand what’s going on in my own life, within myself. There is, in biology, a “super stimulant” concept, which explains that, when an animal has a natural tendency to react to a stimulant, an exaggerated form of that stimulant will cause the animal to exaggerate its reaction to match. It has been studied among birds and was popularized when fish, evolutionarily coded to react to the red underbelly of another species, were found to go exceptionally wild over giant pieces of painted red wood. Human gravitation toward junk food is often used as an example since intake of high-energy foods would have once given evolutionary advantage, so we crave as much as we can get. But I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced anything as super-stimulant strong as artificial light—it calls to me in its various forms, and gorging on it from the comfort of my couch is as easy as chomping chips.
When moths circle lightbulbs, throwing themselves against sources of artificial light, they are likely aiming for the moon. When birds get caught in tunnels of light, they’re likely trying to read the stars. And when we throw ourselves against computers and tablets and phones as we scroll social media sites, we are likely attempting to reach the hearth fires that we, as humans, have always depended on. We’re seeking sensory-rich exchanges and comradery and caring reconciliation. And, though our minds might be stimulated by their abstract representations, our bodies are finding two-dimensional, amped-up facades. Artificial light, a false prophet.
It seems so simple: Let’s power down our computers! Let’s put away our phones! Let’s stop taking in passive entertainment and make our own! Let’s turn the lights off so we can get to sleep! And yet, many of us can’t.
Reducing light pollution—on both micro and macro levels—doesn’t fundamentally require human technology, only human temperance. After all, we have the technology we need to solve many of our most pressing environmental issues, across disciplines, but we have a hard time culturally accepting and implementing them. We argue about economics. We tussle about resources. We complain and criticize. We get stuck in our daylight minds when what we need are reduced-energy conversations of aid and healing. In lieu of hearth fires, we turn to online forums, staring directly into the blue light that our bodies have potentially evolved to associate with logistics and griping, light spectra that studies have shown to increase emotions of dissatisfaction and depression.
Lightbulbs are ubiquitous symbols of epiphany. But what if darkness, not light, is the mother of meaning? There seems to be a growing awareness that, with the loss of natural night, we’re missing something more than opportunities to stargaze. There has been a rise in the popularity of “dark dining,” where people eat without lights so that they might tap their nonvisual senses. There are, increasingly, darkness retreats, where people go into light-sealed rooms for weeks at a time, food delivered through door slits like alcohol in a Prohibition speakeasy. Unable to sip darkness as nature dictates, on those retreats, people attempt to chug it as if to make up for the deficiency. But we cannot be sustained by darkness or light alone. It is only through the impermanence of day and night that life on Earth endures.
Maybe humanity isn’t afraid of the dark so much as we’re afraid of losing light. It’s been our species’ caretaker for so long, it’s understandable that we don’t want to let it out of our sight. But when you know how to make light with your own hands, when you know that you are the light, it’s easier to welcome night. It’s easier to accept that a dark screen is not the end of a story. It’s more of a meditative passage in an ongoing narrative in which we are, as humans, key players. Because we all—every single one of us—have fire in our bellies. We all, in various combustive forms, have flames at our fingertips.
The curious thing about this hearth fire—as opposed to all the electric lights in my life—is that, if it went out completely, I could take the outstretched hand of a spicebush shrub or tulip poplar tree and they’d lead me back to light. It’s wild to befriend a living forest in this way. And after experiencing the elation of fire-making, after living out the true energetic cost of having night light, it’s hard to consider this fire’s demise. But, just as there is an art to building a blaze, there is an art to dismantling it with grace.
Luke tells me that the most elegant way he knows to put a fire out is also an exercise in human restraint. It’s more ceremony than convenience. It’s not a single action, but, rather, the accumulation of many. In terms of animal behavior, the fact that humans can extinguish fires might be no less amazing than the fact that we can build them. Because, sometimes, to survive, we need to build fires. And, sometimes, to survive, we need to put fires out.
To travel toward the deep end of darkness with paleo-elegance, Luke explains that I need to invest time in retracing my steps, moving through the tinder spectrum in the opposite direction, enacting a light weaning. I need to nurse the flames slowly, adding ever-smaller branches, then twigs, until my offerings become so tiny that I can barely feel them between my fingertips. When I focus my bodily energy on tending this fire down, the flames I’ve built will naturally settle back into embers.
By the lowering light of this fire, I’m inspired. In the coming weeks, I will attempt to purchase some incandescent, warm-spectrum bulbs for my bedroom lamps, only to discover that they’ve already been phased out of the market—due to concerns about the heat of energy, without regard to the rising cost of light. By necessity, then, I’ll go all in, buying bulbs that burn campfire red. The change of color itself will inspire me to notice the presence of indoor lighting I’ve previously taken for granted as no more noticeable than air.
The bulb’s red-hot hue will reconcile, in my mind if not my body, the realities of heat and light. It will remind me that, for light’s presence at night, I am always trading natural darkness. I am always destroying something; that’s the cost of artificial light. I’m not interested in trying to hand-make fire every evening, but becoming more cognizant of energy will lead me to, in my nightly habits, wean from blue spectra a little earlier, switching to warm lights that match sunset-ripening skies in real time.
This will help me get out of my circadian rhythm’s way, let my body freely produce melatonin and rhodopsin, give myself space for far-roaming ideas as I drift. I’ll soon start sleeping better. Whether it’s a physiological response or a psychological reaction, I cannot say—and I’m not sure it matters. Either way, I’ll be sliding into night on sunset beams, reading books by light that evokes campfires.
Archer, in his preteen way, will complain that the red bulbs make our house look haunted. I’ll welcome the teachable moment, pointing out that every lightbulb powered by fossil fuel is a portal through which ghost energy enters. A lightbulb powered by coal is the resurrected energy of plants that brushed against the legs of dinosaurs. A lightbulb fed by oil marks the energetic return of creatures that once floated in ancient inland seas. Even solar energy is the stored memory of a sun that’s left the scene, if temporarily.
The less light used, the lesser the haunting. I imagine how I might have explained this to him as a small child, how it might have helped him see artificial light as more of an overarching threat than natural darkness from the start.
I’ll think he’s written the whole thing off until I see red light coming from under his bedroom door. Then, one evening, a question: “What’s better for sleep, a red light on or no light at all?” And, that very night, he’ll change his pattern of keeping a night-light on, choosing, instead, to sleep in the dark.
This gentler arrival of night indoors will help me see my bedroom anew. Just as I’ve come to know my neighborhood differently at night, I’ll start noticing tiny blue and green lights on my device chargers, which make my bedroom look less like a sacred cave, more like a spaceship control panel. Studies have shown that even low-level artificial light can disturb sleep patterns and activate the body’s fight-or-flight responses instead of allowing for parasympathetic, cooling states that create slowed heartbeats and relaxed breathing during sleep.
In Japan, researchers have found that the brightness of a single streetlight shining through a bedroom window increases rates of depression. In China, they have found that light pollution is linked to diabetes. Even sleeping with the light of a television screen is enough to cause glucose imbalances that contribute to weight gain, obesity, and cardiometabolic disease. Our bodies gauge light and dark even when we’re unconscious, tremendously altering bodily processes in ways we’re just discovering. For these reasons and more, I’ll unplug most of the devices in my bedroom. The few light-dots that seem necessary to leave plugged in, I’ll cover with pieces of painter’s tape.
These actions will not clear all the modern-day tinder from my mind. They will not prevent all my fritzed-out days. They will not save me from feeling behind. They will not stop me from checking email or falling prey to Netflix binges. They will not stop the world from spinning. If anything, they will help my body better sense rotation: darkness, slipping into residence so that daylight can take a break.
In time, both indoor and outdoor light shifts will be felt in my body, with regularity, as a minor-key settling. I will, finally, be showing myself the same courtesy that I exhibited toward fireflies when I used red lights in their domain. It has taken all of this to help me see how, when I pulled curtains tight to protect fireflies, I was wrapping all that artificial light around myself. I knew then that the spectra that are best for fireflies at night—that is, red lights or no lights at all—were also best for me. Still, it took making fire with sticks and my bare hands for me to absorb the fact that I have the capacity to release my grip on high-octane light energy.
Exploring the dark side of these mountains—on a journey to find beauty in the yin as well as the yang—has ultimately prevented me from living a life of lights unexamined. Maybe I was always meant to end up here, a student of darkness studying light in the form of a dwindling fire that’s still warming my hands.
When a neighbor shows up for a visit, his arrival is announced via LED headlights in the distance. The lights serve as a reminder that we are visiting, not living in, the Paleolithic. Luke leaves to greet the new arrival. Fenrir and I will follow, but we linger for a minute in prehistory, enjoying our shared ancestry. Me, of the fire-making hominids. Him, of the fire-sitting wolves who roamed the late Pleistocene.
This happens to be the height of the autumnal songbird migration, bookend to last spring’s owl-moonwatching. I imagine that from above, this fire looks like a tiny red ember at the base of a massive, charred-spindle-dust mountain. If I listen carefully, I might catch wind of a thousand birds, headed to a thousand different nesting places, all of them protected by this relatively dark Appalachian flyway.
Every marvel I’ve ever searched for in these mountains already knew where to find me. There are surely leopards and tigers among this acreage’s holy humus. And I have good reason to believe that, along a nearby creek, dormant glowworms are waiting for the return of their luminescent season. And on every uncertain path I’ve wandered, in every moment of bewilderment and wonder, even on the darkest of nights when I’ve felt lost in grief and confusion, I’ve been carrying the promise of light in my core, sure as a firefly illuminates the scale of their world.
Those creatures, like me, are only able to make light because they are blessed by the offerings of other species that, like them, depend on cycles of light and dark—right down to the sturdy oak leaves that give them shelter. Firefly larvae are undoubtedly encircling this hearth, their lanterns shining and fading. All of us preparing for the long night of winter. Unlike in years past—now that I have leaves and stars tangled in my hair—I do not dread it.
From the cycles of light and dark, none of us can be parsed out completely. On and on, we all, together, keep bringing this world into being. Night follows day. Spring follows winter. How fortunate I am to be among the humans who’ve witnessed this shape-shifting, this perpetual blinking. I hope I am not among the last. We craft the world, bulb by bulb, seed by seed. And we’ll know we’re on our way to wellness when stars begin to, once again, reveal themselves.
May we learn to love darkness as our ancestors learned to love light, so that we might play a role in nature’s reliable cycling. May we begin to recognize that, just as we’ve tended the lights up, we can tend them down—revealing wonders that are, in daylight, unimaginable. May we find our way back to natural darkness, or at least hold fast to the wilderness that still exists, so that we’ll be able to bear witness to night’s living riches. May we, as a species, relearn how to blink, letting both night and day have their space. Because it is only by the power of light and the grace of darkness that we’re able to rest and rise, then rest and rise again. That’s the beauty; that’s the blinking.
Behind me, Fenrir stirs. In front of me, newly formed bits of charcoal crackle and cackle, energy condensing in their bright-hot cores. I’m tending this fire down to darkness, but I know that if I called on flames, they would rush back to my side, sure as Fenrir. At this point, all it would take is a whisper. There is comfort in the notion. There is power in resisting the urge. I lean into the black dog at my back, and he presses his weight against mine. We are animals, both acutely alive and resting in peace tonight.