Deep Time: Reclaim the Night
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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 Strange-Hampson, and this episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge will make the case for reclaiming the night.

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There's an ancient tradition practiced every year by small groups of people in England at night. What time is it? Well, we usually move at around 11 o'clock, maybe just before, so darkness will have completely enveloped the land. This is musician Sam Lee. He leads Nightingale Tours. 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 birdsong 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 realise 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. 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 second hand 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? No, not at all. They couldn't care less. No, really? Oh, really? Oh, I just assumed. When we get to the birds, yes, I would not 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. I would imagine it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. I mean, don't you get people saying, no, I just, I need a little flashlight. I can't do this without any light at all.

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. It's so rare that we would do that. It's the final frontier. Yeah.

To me, this sounds like such an extraordinary experience to have without the reason you're there, which is the nightingale. You're there to hear a bird that is legendary. And there are only a few weeks a year you can listen, right? 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 because I think we have a

crisis in our belief system that nature needs to be left alone and we are bad for nature. 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 and 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. You just stay home in front of Netflix. Exactly. So the thing that you do that is so beautiful that I want to 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?

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, it's a nightingale. How lucky am I that I just met the right place at the right time?

You've got to be a bit of a night owl to have those encounters. But then I made a radio documentary for BBC honouring 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

And she convinced the BBC to try out this new technology in her back garden with her playing cello with her nightingale that she discovered by accident by just indulging in the spring. I used to wander about the garden, you know, with 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 birds

He used to sing in thirds with me and it was such a joy. He used to twiddle about with the... 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.

probably the first ever bit of viral media. Wow. It was to that time, like the iPhone or the iPod or AI, altogether never had media been able to transmit singly at the same time. And everyone phoned each other and said, get onto the radio, listen, listen, listen. Beatrice Harrison was Elgar's favourite cellist, but it was her Nightingale concerts that the nation made a date with. They were broadcast from her garden every May the 19th until 1942,

That night, an ominous bass note accompanied the nightingale and the BBC engineer recognised 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. Do you remember the first time you yourself tried making any kind of music with the bird? Yeah.

I have to think that was a life-changing experience. Absolutely. 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 thornbush, daring to make music with this master musician, you know, I'd listen, but I couldn't respond.

Never! That was 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 out of that night, out of that experience, going, "People have to experience this. People have to be here." As we sit there,

listening to a gorgeous musician with this bird and we're 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. 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? I think about this a lot, and...

undermining your question because I think it's a really important question. Why do we ask the question that way round and not on the assumption that of course we've made music with the natural world because we were always part of the natural world. We've been entirely evolved in accordance through our ears and listening and communication has been adopted from the animal kingdom. At what point generation by generation did we

stop bothering to do it. 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. I thought she was.

An angel bright Come tripping down so low Same kind sound

I'm a country boy. And modest to me she plies. And I daily lay by.

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. Maybe not. What would you say?

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 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 a 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. Grief is in there. Rage is also in there. And I think this is where art...

comes into its true power. It's a transmuter of those qualities. It digests it, ingests and it

converts that into heat and love. There's so much to be learnt from these birds.

Really? Like what? 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. And what about musical qualities? 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're singing.

No, tell me. Tell me one. That's amazing. Well, there's so many examples. 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 nightingales had been terrible weather. And this night the birds were not being very cooperative with

which happens about three or four percent 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, it was just beautiful. Listen to the song. It was just magic. You know, there she was, 16 year old. She'd never been out of 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. Oh my God. And the group gasped and then tears just fell from our faces. That was it. Wow. What more proof do we need that singing with the animal world, with nature, is possible?

Bloody good for us, I'll tell you. You hear a story like that and it just almost makes me want to cry thinking of how much there is that we just don't listen to.

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 vast.

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 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 re-evaluation 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 pretty bird, wonders as she flies.

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's your line? Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Doing this, having this conversation for you, putting out albums, taking people into the woods to hear Nightingale's

actually might make a difference. Do you really believe that? 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. And I'll give a little secret away.

My big moment for me, 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 going to ravish their wintering habitat, rendering their migratory capabilities impossible. But it's about fossil fuels. It all comes down to fossil fuels. And the Tadar 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. It's activism. It really is activism. And I do it to create enchantment, but also to create the will for change. So you said enchantment, and that's the other, I think, really important piece because it's

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 an endling, in your awareness of the vanishing folk song tradition that you're trying to restore. So there can be grief there.

And yeah, 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 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. 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 honour of all those generations that did sing and play and revere nature. And 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 homes

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 Nightingalers, 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 sombre, sometimes it would be sexy and illicit 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 going to get really close and it's very easy to scare them. In England we only have six, seven weeks of this song. Such a short period, their mating song.

They've been doing this for millions of years. Humans have evolved listening to nightingales. You know, it's 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. 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 Appalachia next for more nighttime magic. I'm Anne Sternchamps, and you're listening to our Deep Time series, Unto 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 Leanne Henyon discovered a deeper darkness than she expected, not too far from her North Carolina home. 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. Leanne Henyon 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 Cain was kind of enchanted. 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. You know, this journey started with a magazine assignment.

I had a beloved editor who said, you know, 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 fireplace of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I didn't know what that experience was going to be like. And I thought that synchronous fireflies were just going to kind of blare, then go quiet, then blare and go quiet. But what they actually do is,

It's when you're watching them in the forest, it's like watching the Northern Lights. They whoosh, you know, 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 this is moving through the forest. It's gorgeous. I very rarely in my life had ever walked around outdoors without a flashlight, 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, you know, 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 were

are neon blue. Oh, really? That sounds awesome. 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 constantly.

basically neon writing in the night. Oh my God, that sounds amazing. 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. So it's not always that changed people, but it becomes a tourist thing, right? I mean, people come to that area now to see the different kinds of fireflies. Yeah.

you know 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

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. I didn't know even glowworms existed till I read your book. Yeah. So Charles, people refer to different things as glowworms.

Sometimes they'll refer to firefly larvae as glowworms. Oh my God, I never thought about firefly larvae. So right now. Okay, go ahead. 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. Wow.

Do the old timers that you know, grandma, great grandma, are they like, you idiot? We knew all this stuff was here the whole time. I think about this all the time. And we are 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. We're afraid of the dark. You're not afraid of the light. Yeah. What do you think we're afraid of? Because it's very human to want to cover darkness with light.

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. Yeah.

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. Yeah, look, I don't grab the flashlight when I go out. If I want to go in the woods, I don't just grab the flashlight so I don't fall. I grab the flashlight because I'm afraid. Yeah, I've been terrified at moments. Yeah.

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. Right. That it was just absolutely amazing.

It was delightful to consider that the unknown doesn't just hold dangers. The unknown holds wonders. The unknown holds discovery. 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.

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? 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. So we're really affecting basically every living being on earth with this.

this artificial light. How long does it take you to get your eyes accustomed? My brother and I had this thing we did when we were kids. We must have heard someone say six minutes once somewhere. Like, it takes six minutes in total darkness to have your eyes accustomed. Of course, it was our bedroom, so it doesn't count. But how long does it take?

Well, after I spent a lot of time doing this and after I was searching for foxfire and glowworms and all of 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. Yeah, I bet. I thought it'd take longer, right? 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. One of the things I'm going to do is,

that I really respect that you had in the book that was 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. 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

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 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 yes,

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.

Do you feel the difference making darkness part of your life? Do you feel different? 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. Yeah, right. Yeah. So I created situations that helped me sort of transition and

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. 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 want to go down. So I get out by myself middle of the night. It must've been 11, 12 o'clock at night. I was afraid the entire time. Yeah, I did it, but I was afraid of 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. 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. Of course, the knowledge of knowing what's there makes you less afraid because you know what's there. It's just something that once you start doing it, you're like, how is it possible that I've never done this before? Yeah.

That's Leigh-Anne Henyon talking with producer Charles Monroe Cain 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 Calliopeia 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. ♪

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.

To the best of our knowledge, it's 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 Hartke, with help from Sarah Hopeful. Additional music and ambient recordings by Sam Lee, Leanne Henyon, Sam Goldberg, and nocturnal creatures from around the world.

Until next time, we wish you adventure and wonder in the night. PR.