“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”

—Wendell Berry

To walk through a forest at night is a wondrous gift. The creaks of branches, the croaks of frogs, and the hoots of owls offer a hymn of proof that life does not dim with the light. A quickened pulse, a rapid heartbeat—every step might bring us even closer to our own aliveness. Early mammals were almost entirely nocturnal, and were for more than 100 million years; the majority still are today. When we allow ourselves to wander the nocturnal world and let our eyes adjust to the brimming night, we reconnect to our early ancestors who were no strangers to darkness.

It is to those early mammals that we owe our existence. During the Mesozoic Era, towering reptiles dominated the daytime. According to the nocturnal bottleneck hypothesis, while dinosaurs roamed everywhere under the sun, small mammals adapted to survive by burrowing away during daylight hours and awakening at night. Many species—including humans—retain the traits they adapted, including rod-dominated retinas, reduced color vision, and strong senses of hearing and smell. Our bodies hold the memory of life lived in collaboration with the night.

Behaviorally, we have strayed far from those ancestors. As nature writer Leigh Ann Henion points out in Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark, the Western world has an ingrained bias against darkness. “Almost every storyline we’re familiar with suggests that we should banish it as quickly as possible—because darkness is often presented as a void of doom rather than a force of nature that nourishes lives, including our own,” she writes. “What might we discover if we pause to consider what darkness offers?”

For all we associate botany with sunlight, some plant species have evolved to drink up the dark. Moonflowers and evening primrose open their petals after dusk, while night-blooming jasmine releases its intoxicating sweetness into the midnight hours. Flowers such as these often produce strong fragrances and sweet nectar in order to attract pollinators by scent and taste, and possess pale petals in order to increase visibility in low light. Obscurity creates its own beauty.

An aerial legion of moonlight pollinators sustain such beauty and by extension, the ecosystems in which they are found. Drawn to the fragrance of these blooms, moths can carry more pollen over even further distances than bees—archivists of the night that help transport genetic information and allow the living world to flourish. They travel long distances by taking celestial cues from the heavens above, maintaining constant angles to distant light sources in order to fly straight in the dark. Sometimes, it is in the unknown that new maps are illuminated.

Some species of bats are also pollinators. Like hummingbirds, they fly in place while lapping up nectar on tongues one and a half times the length of their bodies. Others prey on moths and beetles as they make their rounds. With their echoes, they can tell the shape of their surroundings—a call and response with the night itself. Creating an acoustic tableau of the world, their echolocation is so precise that they can detect objects as thin as a human hair. Maternal colonies use specific echosongs and individual vocal signatures to identify their kin. There is more than one way to see in the dark.

While we villainize the dark, light might be the real enemy today. Globally, LED pollution has increased by 10% each year over the past decade. Meanwhile, creatures who evolved over millennia to depend on the dark suffer—those winged nocturnal emissaries who pollinate the blackness and story the world in echosong. I don’t want to live in a future where fireflies blink out, where moths cease to dust the night sky with the fragrant magic of moonvines. I want to once again become an animal that appreciates the wonder of the darkness from which we came.