Intermission
The very idea of leisure differs slightly around these parts. Back home, leisure is hours and hours of surfing the Internet at a specially-designed cafe. Leisure could also be walking through large buildings, buying items you don't really need. And then there is football, basketball, badminton. Here, leisure is a two-hour drive through the countryside. Around here, leisure is throwing the last of your stale wholemeal breakfast to the ducks in the pond. Leisure is wandering through the heather, sketchpad in hand. Elsewhere, leisure is but a single, crisp autumn leaf crushed underfoot.
We picked a rather quiet area to take a break from the road trip to Dunedin. As always, the road is linear. To the right is the white, precipitous face of a towering cliff while on the left leads somewhere obscured by the shrubs, somewhere with a loud, flowing river. I push past the vegetation towards the source of the sound and find sanctuary.
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Things are not always what they appear to be. So goes the cliche. However, cliche as it may be, sometimes it's true. What may seem as a single pinhole of light in the clear night sky may be a globular cluster through a telescope, billions of stars invisible for millenniums. Take for example Alpha Centauri: A triplet of stars, each brighter than the next. The Ancient Greeks were able to find twelve points in the dark sky and decide it took the form of a woman's body while the Aborigines, continents away, looked inbetween their constellations and saw an emu under Crux. In the dark areas lurk just as many marvels as there are in the lit.
I'm telling you this because in spite of what we think, magnificence can be found in places no one ever bothers to look.
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Here is the first thing I see: A waterfall, streaming down the side of a mountain. Second: A wide meadow of purple flowers and third: The river I was searching for. Water - thousands of cubic metres every minute - sluices over the rocks and falls into the plunge pool below, a roar of purpose. The floral scent is overwhelming; most flowers don't have scents, by the way. Oh, and in the river, there are fish. Silvery and small, they swim in circles, perfectly content with going nowhere.
The river flows at least a few more kilometers downstream, towards the sea. As any twelve-year old would know, water never stops moving, the gift question on any science test. Clouds form somewhere in the troposphere from droplets of water or ice. They deposit their load high in the mountains, which then flows downwards to the river. The river finds the mouth, and runs out to the sea. It evaporates, like a soul, in the heat of the Sun and finds its way back to the clouds. Ask anyone who made it past primary education, this much they'll tell you: Like any other cycle, it starts all over again.