All the Light We Cannot See

You will find dancing between the trees…

The other day I was driving through rural Georgia and lost cell phone reception for a good 10 minutes, so I decided to go old school, pre-podcast style and turn on the radio. The first song to play was R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World,” followed by Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

It was a rookie move. DJ’s dust those doomsday ditties off every time the state of humanity seems to hang by a rapidly fraying thread. I remember the local station playing “End of the World” on loop the night of December 31, 1999, when mass hysteria over a mysterious computer glitch hurtling civilization into a new dark age known as Y2K raged across the planet. The world didn’t end.

Then.

I don’t think it will now, either. Not because I’m an optimist. Because I’m a realist. And history has proven the monumental capacity of this planet and its human and more than human animals to endure impossible trauma and emerge the other side -- profoundly changed, vital and breathing and deepened. Which doesn’t mean there won’t be pain, suffering, tragedy and unspeakable irreversible damage. But I don’t think the lights will go out. Poof. In a blink. I believe the world will keep spinning on its banged up axis.

Which doesn’t mean it isn’t imperative to say aloud what is going on. To name the rapid-fire assaults against human, animal and natural life and dignity as they occur. Note them. Keep a record. Swallow them so they become a part of you:

The authoritarian acts of our political leaders including an egomaniacal trade war used solely to foot the big, beautiful tax bill of the ultra-wealthy; the defunding of our national parks to clear the way for fossil fuel drilling; the funding of ongoing genocides; the mass deportations and illegal disappearances of immigrants many of whom are in this country legally under the false pretense of protecting our “natural born” citizens, but is actually a smoke screen to displace people without white skin, square jaws, or bleached buttholes; and the deployment of the national guard to intervene in what were primarily peaceful protests against said immigration raids that is until armed militia stormed in on horseback tossing tear gas and rubber bullets at unarmed demonstrators.

Then, yes, the fires started.

I believe the world will likely keep spinning, which isn’t to say I haven’t felt this much unease and heartbreak since early days pandemic when I lived alone in a 500 square foot, roach-infested attic apartment and thought, “How do I teach my cats the Heimlich maneuver should I choke on one of my organic gummy bears all alone.”

Things are dark. But I honestly believe it’s essential to not just see the dark. That only helps push the authoritarian agenda forward. They need people to be afraid, angry, hopeless and heartbroken. But it isn’t the whole truth. Nothing teaches you the limitations of the human story as purely as the natural world. In nature, where I go to find calm, peace and refuge from the man-made madness, the full story comes into focus. Light and dark coexist as one. The beautiful rises up and is razed, rises up and is razed, again and again around the suffering and pain of the lived experience, as a knot in a tree.

Pictured here is one of the local parks near our home where peace is sought and often found: Bartram Forest Wildlife Management Area in Milledgeville, Georgia. (It’s where my husband proposed to me with a fallen pine needle wrapped around my ring finger!)

This place is like the UN of ecological biomes. Swampy wetlands and effervescent evergreens and desert conifers and hundreds of Loblolly pines lined like soldiers as far as the eye can see and somewhere in the middle a bucolic lake with warped and windy boardwalks.

“How do I teach my cats the Heimlich maneuver should I choke on one of my organic gummy bears all alone.”

The park's website doesn't give too much away, apart from its namesake being the famous 18th century naturalist William Bartram. After doing my own research, I learned Bartram was the Mr. Rogers/Henry Thoreau of his time, an amiable environmentalist who traveled the country, documenting all matter of flora, fauna, and person with an unwavering diplomacy and without the Native American prejudices of his white male contemporaries.

Bartram was a regular and welcome companion to the region's Native tribes, studying their folklore, politics, and rituals with great reverence. In return, a chief of the Seminole Indians in Florida bestowed Bartram with the honorary title of "Puc-Puggy," or "Flower Hunter." And, two centuries before this land was named for him, Bartram spent years cultivating a closeness with the Indians who knew it as their home: tribes of the Hitchiti, Oconee, Miccosukee and Mvskoke (Creek) nations.

In his book Bartram's Travels, William describes how walking through these fertile woods, his "progress was rendered delightful by the sylvan elegance of the groves and meadows... Where all nature awakens to life and activity."

But as we know, Bartram, a "friend to all" Quaker and advocate for the Native people -- was an exception of the time. The "life and activity" he awakened to would soon be a battlefield of the white settlers fleeing Britain during the Revolutionary war and displacing the Natives in the process. By the early 19th century, rigged land deals, genocide, and the Trail of Tears assured there was scarce left of the native tribes on much of Bartram’s routebut relics buried beneath the loamy soil.

After years of desertion and neglect, the forest found a new inhabitant in the 1840s: the mental patients of the nearby Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot and Epileptic Asylum. The original founders of the sanitarium had benevolent intentions: to create a place for mental health reform and rehabilitation, and the land was used to teach the hands-on therapeutic benefits of farming and gardening. There's a certain poetry in the idea of these patients, taming their inner chaos and turmoil by restoring the overgrown thicket to a halcyon state.

Sidebar: In November 1864, the Asylum's 2000-acre property was used as a campground for the 30,000 soldiers of General Sherman's army during his infamous "March to the Sea." As the then state capital of Georgia, Milledgeville was a prime target for the blue coats, who over the course of four days, left the city in scorched ruin. Anticipating the army's assault, many of the city's wealthiest politicians and officers fled to the nearby woods and swamps to bury their valuables from the approaching marauders.

It makes me think alongside the abandoned arrowheads of the displaced Native people, there may also be a trove of tarnished silver candelabras and crystal goblets in the soil of Bartram Forest.

I can't help digressing into the fate of Georgia's Lunatic Asylum, which was once known as the largest mental institution in the world. But throughout the 20th century, the facility's original vision of reform and rehabilitation was destroyed by overcapacity, corruption, and misconduct. The early doctor-to-patient ratio of 1:5 became an unmanageable 1:100, and reports of patient abuse were so rampant that parents across the entire state of Georgia would scare their misbehaving children straight with the threat,

"Keep it up and I'll send you to Milledgeville!"

The second-hand reports of the kind of evil and torture that continued to persist at the Asylum until it was finally shut down in 2010 are something out of a Saw movie. And looking at pictures of the now-abandoned facilities, with their decaying hospital beds and corroded corridors -- you couldn't pay me a million dollars to walk through there after dark.

The Asylum's connection to Bartram Forest can't be denied, from the hands of its patients digging through its soil, planting seeds to nurture mind and body. And then later, the ghastly sounds emitting from its walls penetrate the evergreen canopy where only the flora and fauna bore witness.

But today, this park named for the "Flower Hunter" has been restored and is a popular destination for mountain bikers and hikers, a beloved resource for 4-H education, and a thriving wildlife preservation site for the sustainable logging of Loblolly pine.

Which is to say -- all of its light is not separate from but born out of immense darkness; its rich beauty is both tragic and triumphant. It's a message I will take moving forward into the unfolding unknown, where the words of another great naturalist Walt Whitman echo gently and true:

"After the dazzle of day is done, only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars."

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