Midnight Mothing Commemorative T-shirt

Midnight Mothing

Midnight always conjures up ideas of late night cemeteries, enchanted forests, and soft glowing lights that are irresistibly attractive to our lurking moth friends. As I’ve traveled across the state’s under-reported counties surveying moths, I often stumble upon private family cemeteries, reminders of a past way of life in North Carolina now mostly forgotten, when we lived a slower, more connected life.

This is Celtic Christian territory, in spirit if not in name. The Highlands are an ocean away, but something of them made its way here too, carried by the people who settled these hills and never quite let go. That connection lingers like a phantom limb, a memory of a place once known, still felt. It’s in these places — thin places, at thin hours — that the veil between worlds grows gossamer-thin, and what lies on the other side becomes palpable, tangible, in the most subtle and ephemeral way.

Here, artist Amber Roth helped us imagine a guardian of the woods: a hybrid grim reaper Mothman, a watchful presence and consciousness that sometimes takes on form to meet the material world. He is not harvesting souls for a nefarious entity, nor is he ushering anyone into the reward of an afterlife. He exists in an eternal state of just being: his own realm, his own bit of reality, in that place through the veil where the cryptids and forest folk reside, just past the edge of human understanding, the realm of pure imagination.

Before him, a purple candle burns with an orange flame, levitating, defying gravity at his command. Moth to the flame — but this time, he controls the flame! He is not being summoned by the light. He is summoning you.

That’s what the late hours hold: solitude, expansive silence, and that ambiguous gray place that is both late night and early morning, all things and no things at once. Go deep enough into that balance, and you find the Source; connection to something greater than ourselves, while also finding the truest parts of who we are.