LONG AFTER SUNSET, on a cool evening last June, my family gathered around a dying fire and watched blue light linger in the rims of sky. It seemed too late for any color to remain, and yet this peripheral glow drew our eyes upward. In the heavens, darkness spreads from the center. In our campsite at Montana’s Medicine Rocks State Park, the opposite was true. Orange coals burned in the heart of a circle, and darkness flourished beyond its border. On Earth, a reverse image of heaven…

In the daytime, we would see swells of bluegrass, Junegrass, yucca, and prickly pear lapping at the shores of a sandstone archipelago, each island wind-whipped into astonishing shapes. Narrow tendons of rock stretched up into tiny mesas where plumes of ponderosa swayed. The walls of each figure, pocked with ovular hollows and grooved with deep shelves, slid down into labyrinthine channels of juniper and sagebrush — the prairie equivalent of tide pools.

In nighttime, however, darkness made infinite detail invisible and left only the outlines of each earthstack evident against the horizon. … A solar lantern we’d set on a picnic table threw light against ponderosa trunks and into their needled canopy. From our vantage point, this cool blue essence hovered within the dark copse like a biosphere on a hostile planet.

But this was a fragile illusion, because the unseen world is teeming with life. More than two-thirds of animals are nocturnal, 80 percent of migratory birds travel in the dark, and insect activity increases by one-third at nighttime. The nonhuman life we perceive in our waking hours is a tiny sliver of Earth’s animate existence. Ignorance, then, is the most basic tenet of human endeavor, a revelation that our consciousness quickly confirms when we allow ourselves to enter the dark. And this awareness of ignorance is not merely a sense of the unknown; it is a sense of not being able to know.

Writer Gabriel Furshong gets lost in the night sky and returns with a new sense of self — and sanctuary.

Photo by BJDLZX / iStock

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