Dedication
To my luminous children,
Poppy and Sam,
and my mother, Judy,
the lamp who has lit our family.
And to Jock,
who, herself, is
incandescence in the dark.
Epigraph
Phosphorescence. Now there’s a word to lift your hat to . . . to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that’s the genius behind poetry . . .
— Emily Dickinson
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Prelude: A Light Within
Part I: Awe, Wonder and Silence
In the company of arsonists
Chapter 1: Lessons from a Cuttlefish
Chapter 2: Bathe in Nature
Chapter 3: ‘A Better Show Outside’
Chapter 4: Why We Need Silence
Chapter 5: The Overview Effect
Part II: We Are All Wiggly
Why we need to tell our imperfect stories
Chapter 6: The Activist’s Attic
Chapter 7: Honour the Temporary
Chapter 8: Accept Imperfection
Chapter 9: Seeing the Whole Person
Chapter 10: Let Yourself Go
Chapter 11: Letter to a Young Woman
Chapter 12: Own Your Authority
Part III: Walking Each Other Home
The art of friendship: ‘I am here’
Chapter 13: Freudenfreude: Sharing the Joy
Chapter 14: She Trashed Her Golden Locks
Chapter 15: Burning Bright: Candy Royalle
Chapter 16: The Lassie Effect
Part IV: Invincible Summer
Regarde: Look, and savour
Chapter 17: Thoughts for My Son: The Art of Savouring
Chapter 18: Ert, or a Sense of Purpose
Chapter 19: Growing by the Light of the Moon
Chapter 20: Lessons on Hope from the Hanoi Hilton
Chapter 21: Raiding the Unspeakable
Chapter 22: Embracing Doubt
Coda: Floating in the Bardo
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
Prelude
A Light Within
THERE ARE FEW THINGS as startling as encountering an unearthly glow in the wild. Glow-worms. Ghost mushrooms. Fireflies. Flashlight fish. Lantern sharks. Vampire squid. Our forest floors and ceilings, our ocean depths and fringes are full of luminous beings, creatures lit from the inside. And they have, for many centuries, enchanted us, like glowing missionaries of wonder, emissaries of awe.
Is there anything more beautiful than living light?
Before science explained the phenomenon in its various forms, it was the stuff of myth and legend. Aristotle puzzled over damp wood that glowed in the dark. The Japanese imagined fireflies to be the souls of the dead, or, more specifically, of samurai killed in battle. Sailors aboard ships gliding through luminescent blooms thought the seas were on fire; they spoke of ‘burning seas’, ‘milky oceans’ or ‘smouldering coals’ on the water; Aristotle referred to ‘exhalations of fire from the sea’. In 1637, French philosopher René Descartes saw seawater ‘generate sparks rather similar to those which are emitted by pieces of flint when they are struck’. In 1688, French Jesuit missionary Père Guy Tachard declared the sparks were a consequence of the sun impregnating the sea by day with ‘an infinity of fiery and luminous spirits’, and these spirits uniting after dark ‘to pass out in a violent state’. Some observers, watching light-trails spinning out from bows in the Indian Ocean, called them ‘The Wheels of Poseidon’.
For me, today, these lights are the perfect metaphor for flashes of life in the middle of the dark, or joy in difficult times. But in centuries past, they were sheer magic. Charles Darwin was awestruck when he saw, while sailing through the Rio de la Plata in the South Atlantic in 1845, ‘a sea that presented a wonderful and most beautiful spectacle . . . The vessel drove before her bows two billows of liquid phosphorous, and in her wake she was followed by a milky train. As far as the eye reached the crest of every wave was bright, and the sky above the horizon, from the reflected glare of the livid flames, was not so utterly obscure as over the vault of the heavens.’
No one attempted to seriously understand these mysterious occurrences until after World War I. During the conflict, tiny natural lights in the sea inadvertently aided war efforts by illuminating submarines: in November 1918, British naval officers sailing off the coast of Spain spied a large outline beneath them glowing and outlined by ‘sea fire’, and attacked. This was the last German U-boat submarine to be destroyed in the war.
During World War II, the Japanese devised a clever way of illuminating maps with a light so faint that it would not alert enemies to their presence. Their army harvested vast piles of crustaceans called umihotaru or ostracods — also known as sea fireflies — from the waters surrounding their country, and distributed them to their fighting units. The soldiers then only needed to hold these dried plankton in their hands, trickle liquid onto them and crush them to obtain light. Scientist Osamu Shimomura said: ‘It was an easy, simple source of light. You just add water. Very convenient. You don’t need any batteries.’ More than fifty years later, Shimomura — who won a Nobel prize in 2008 for his work on green fluorescent protein in jellyfish — was able to produce the same effect for a colleague in a darkened room, clenching his fist then opening it to reveal a cool blue light.
By this time, both America and Russia had begun to study luminous creatures in earnest. In the 1960s, the US Naval Oceanographic Office published a seminal study, relying on centuries of shipping records and journals in which naval officers struggled to describe what they saw. You can hear the gasp and wonder in their words, the fumbling for language adequate to describe the scenes. The lights were said to be like ‘a mass of boiling turquoise foam’, ‘a luminous serpent’, a ‘welding torch’, ‘the illuminated dial of a wrist-watch’, ‘magnesium burning’. One witness reported being able to read on deck at night, due to the bright white light of the sea, ‘like that from molten iron’.
Stories of these sightings had circled the globe for as long as ships had done the same: ‘spark-type displays’ in the Gulf of Maine in summer; ‘green fire’ strong enough to enter the portholes of a ship in Chesapeake Bay and ‘reflect from the ceiling of a stateroom’; ‘red tides’ off the coast of Florida and Texas that turned luminescent at night; glowing waters in the Canary Islands; sea like a ‘star spangled sky’ in the western Mediterranean basin; ‘flashes of light’ in broken ice off the west coast of Norway; ‘sparkling emerald dots’ in the Orkney Islands; glowing balls in the Thames; green oar-strokes in the Irish Sea. In False Bay, off Cape Town, South Africa, what seemed a ‘greasy froth’ by day was a lake of ‘molten gold’ at night. When a tsunami receded at night near Sanriku, on the island of Honshu in Japan, ‘The exposed bottom was strongly luminescent with a bluish white light of such strength that land objects were visible as in daylight.’
While the US Navy was documenting this puzzling wizardry, American author and marine biologist Rachel Carson discovered a similar phenomenon as she waded around the shores of the Atlantic at night, shining a torch into dark waters. In August 1956, she wrote to her beloved friend Dorothy Freeman, describing ‘my beach’ during the spring tides of the new moon:
There had been lots of swell and surf and noise all day, so it was most exciting down there toward midnight — all my rocks crowned with foam . . . To get the full wildness, we turned off our flashlights — and then the real excitement began. The surf was full of diamonds and emeralds, and was throwing them on the wet sand by the dozens. Dorothy, dear — it was the night we were there all over, but with everything intensified; a wilder accompaniment of noise and movement, and a great deal more phosphorescence. The individual sparks were so large — we’d see them glowing in the sand, or sometimes, caught in the in-and-out play of water, just riding back and forth. And several times I was able to scoop one up in my hand in shells and gravel, and think surely it was big enough to see — but no such luck.