This week on TTBOOK, we mark the Winter Solstice with a new episode in our "Deep Time" series. “Reclaim the Night” is an ode to darkness and an invitation, or maybe provocation: What if just once during this season we turned off the lights, left our glowing screens behind and ventured out into natural darkness – what marvels might we find? Writer-naturalists Sam Lee and Leigh Ann Henion enchanted us with their stories of nightingale songs and phosphorescent glow worms. But I wrapped the show thinking, as usual, that there’s so much else I wish we’d had time to include. Darkness, it turns out, has a deep backstory. Like the rest of nature, we humans have a long nocturnal history.
On the notes page where I stashed ideas back when I was researching the episode, is this article about the enduring tradition of Watch Night services dating back to New Year’s Eve,1862, when many Black Americans gathered to wait for President Abraham Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation into law, freeing those still enslaved. Also, there’s this National Geographic article about how reading the night sky helped Black American freedom seekers survive. And thinking about darkness as a refuge rather than a source of danger led me to the book I’m reading now – "Night Flyer," Tiya Miles’s wonderful new biography of Harriet Tubman. Pushing past the standard mythos, Miles gives us a visceral portrait of Tubman’s inner life and faith, of a passage through spiritual wilderness that echoed her nighttime travels through the ecology of America’s unmapped forests.
For those with a more academic turn of mind, I was also fascinated to discover not one but two books on darkness in the ancient world: "Archeology of the Night," edited by Nancy Gonlin and April Nowell, and "The Archeology of Darkness," edited by Marion Dowd and Robert Hensey. Between the two, you get a complete overview of ancient nighttime practices, from Paleolithic use of deep caves for ritual experience, to ancient Mayan cacao-infused midnight dances. The more I read, the more I realized how impoverished our nights have become since we lit up the planet artificially — but what a rich and sacred world still awaits us in the dark.
Happy solstice from your friends at TTBOOK,
– Anne