Light has the power to illuminate more than just the physical environment around us: it can transform a landscape, teach us more about the natural world, and connect us in ways that linger long after the lights turn off.

After months of being at home, this winter I went a few hours north to Paso Robles, a place where the rolling hills gathered together. The landscape felt stricken: the grass brittle with months of California drought, the dirt cracking. The people around me seemed battered, too, uncomfortable in heavy coats, eyes tired above their masks. We plodded along on paths through to a valley that was pincushioned with what I knew were lights, but looked like small bubbles on stems. We tried to perch on railings and were told not to sit on the railings. We shifted over, we made space, we wondered how long this would take and how much colder it would get.

Then the lights turned on.

It was subtle thing: at first just a small brightness, then a steadier glow. I wasn’t sure whether to look at a single light and watch it cycle through a rainbow of colors, or to expand my view so I could see patchworks of color emerging in waves across hillsides, into small valleys, rippling around a coast live oak. White and blue, purple and orange, each getting more intense as the sun continued to set, and then vanished. The air grew colder, but something else felt more alive: people seemed to crackle with quiet energy, to pause, to help search for a misplaced set of keys, to make an extra space on the hay bale. The 15-acre light installation by British artist Bruce Munro seemed to spark something new—a communal energy that somehow used the technological wonder of the artwork to enhance the natural beauty of the surroundings, from the oaks that seemed to grow up through the lights to the silhouettes of our own species in the growing dark.

All year, I’d been lamenting the technology we needed to get through the pandemic: the endless Zooms, the online classrooms, the sites where you could play board games at a distance, the telehealth appointments. All things that I was grateful for—they kept me healthy, sane, made me temporarily feel less alone. But like so many other people, I had trouble returning into my body and the world around me after so much time spent receiving and giving information and energy through a screen. The world often felt both out of reach and unreal once I tried to return to it. But here, fiber optics and projectors and solar power made the landscape more, not less, beautiful. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of the technology; before the sky went fully dark, the small white lines of electrical cords were visible as they coiled on the surface of the field. But being among all of these small lights brought me closer to the landscape, and to myself, in a way that the faster, “smarter” devices that I’d relied on. These weren’t spotlights that forced the landscape to display itself. The illumination almost seemed to come from the air around me, or from within the land itself. It was an imagined thing, but still: there I was, breathing deeply in the crowded dark, as if the light itself could find its way into my lungs.

Something about this glowing field reminded me of a conversation I had a few years before with Troy Magney, a biologist, as he was moving from Los Angeles to a new job in Davis. It was nighttime, and he was driving along California’s main north-south artery, Interstate 5, the hills of Paso Robles a few dozen miles to the west. In the dark, the hills would have been almost invisible, the road lit instead by the oncoming lights of the big rigs heading south, the red tail lights to the north. We’d talk for a while and then the line would go dark, too, for a moment, as he passed in and out of range.

Magney studies light of a different sort: the kind given off by the work of photosynthesis, when a plant or tree turns sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water into energy. Chlorophyll is what makes plants green. It also collects energy from the sun, and when this happens, one of its electrons is bumped into a higher energy state. When the chlorophyll settles down again, it releases a photon, a tiny packet of light.

A tool called a spectrometer can capture this unseen light, and Magney has used them in several western forests. Spectrometers can see the fine details of how a tree’s photosynthesis changes with the position of the Sun in the sky or the brief transit of a cloud. The dramatic change is seasonal: although evergreen trees don’t look much different to us in the summer or winter—that’s how they got their name, after all—they go nearly dormant when it comes to making energy so that they can protect themselves from harsh winters.

Their light, seen by spectrometer, begins to shine again come springtime. And once they start taking in sunlight to transform, it’s full-throttle, Magney says. “They go from zero to full photosynthesis within a week or two.”

Magney and his colleagues think this is important because they want to be able to track photosynthesis around the world, as the turning wheel of sunlight to plant energy is also what pulls carbon dioxide out of the air. To measure global CO2 levels, they want to see how large forests are working as carbon sinks, year after year. Looking at this light that trees produce, Magney says, “could give us a pulse on the biosphere.” The light signals sent off by trees can tell us more about their health, too. Stress from beetle infestation, or drought, almost immediately tamps down the rate of photosynthesis—so a dimming of their light could provide an almost immediate indication that something’s wrong.

The idea of trees’ invisible glow has stayed with me through the years, as Magney has expanded his work to other forests, to newer, more sensitive equipment that can see trees in a way we can’t. It makes me wonder what else is out there, glowing, without anyone to notice. Not that it needs us to notice. Evergreens will keep gathering sunlight whether or not we are watching. But something that reveals more connections—between the trees and the sunlight and the air we breathe—seems to fill some sort of lack.

At a 2014 conference at UC Santa Cruz, Ursula K. LeGuin gave a talk that, in part, discussed moving beyond considering the world as disposable and seeing technology as the way to fix it. “To use the world well, we need to relearn our being in it,” she said—not only in terms of returning to our kinship with other animals, but to other living and nonliving beings. Plants. The landscape around us. She described this relationship as complex and reciprocal, with humans “as particularly lively, intense, aware nodes of relation in an infinite network of connections . . . infinite but locally fragile, with and among everything—all beings—including what we generally class as things, objects.” At its best, could technology help us envision the connections that we cannot see, or even imagine the connections that we have yet to discover?

For Munro, bringing new connections to light took both immersion in the landscape and time. After living in Australia for eight years, he and his future wife planned a farewell tour of the country before returning to the UK. Munro had heard about Australia’s Northern Territory, its red desert, the iconic rock formation of Uluru, but he didn’t expect much. “I was quite cynical about it,” he says now. But when he visited the desert and the rock monolith that has been a sacred, living landscape to the Anangu people for tens of thousands of years, something changed. Munro remembers energy, electricity, feeling fully alive. “The whole desert has this presence that’s in the air,” he says.

He sketched and wrote about the experience for years before starting to experiment with fiber optics in the field outside of his home in Wiltshire, in southwest England. Acrylic stems, topped with glass bulbs, would be like seeds scattered in the desert—dormant, then bursting to life when conditions are right. Since then, he’s brought these lights into new landscapes. In Paso Robles, where I saw Munro’s Field of Light at Sensorio installation, there are more than 58,800 of these small seeds sown in the hills, powered by the Sun—and as it sets, the seeds come softly into bloom. Munro and his team of collaborators, from electricians to installers, have tested the LED projectors they use to keep the light at low levels, gentle as starlight, to draw viewers’ attention to the landscape instead of outshining it. At another of Munro’s fields of light, this one in Uluru, having the Milky Way overhead makes the experience feel “as if you’re standing in a ring of light,” he says.

The stars above Paso Robles were not as visible. Still, after an hour of wandering through the fields here, I could see more beauty in the barren hills, and in the crowd of people who, in the midst of a pandemic winter, seemed to be lit from within.

When a too-bright light flashes across our field of vision, sometimes the afterimage of the light remains even after we look away. The way this happens is not well understood, but it may be something called retinal inertia, where the cells at the back of the eye continue to respond to the light even after it is gone. I understand even less about what has lingered after being in these fields of light.

It’s true that even now, if I close my eyes, I can remember the color that unfurled itself across the darkened field, the way these small lights drew attention not just to themselves, but to the oak trees, the hillsides, the dark sky. But there’s another afterimage that still seems imprinted on the space between the shoulder blades, the back of my lungs, the far side of my heart—the places in my body that keep reminding me that among the lights, people were good, and the world was more beautiful than I understood. An afterimage that, I hope, will not fade.

Cameron Walker is a writer based in California. Her essay collection, Points of Light, is forthcoming from Hidden River Press.

Website: www.cameronwalker.net