Eleusis

It is like stars in the deep of the night sky over the hills of Sainte Foy, glimpsed beyond Romanesque architecture; it is like the phosphorescence of thought spreading; like endless flight across the sea of stars; it is like the elephants that, when the Moon is new, go down to the river and solemnly bathe – a holy baptism – and salute the Moon before returning to the woods; it is like the toheroa along Te Oneroa a Tohe that, in the night, thrust themselves up from the sand as the waves crash up the beach so that they may be carried higher up or lower down the beach to feed on diatoms, their shells scintillant beneath the Moon like the dragon teeth that Jason planted in distant Colchis; it is like the light of the world born in a dark stable with animals; it is like running, lost, in the cold, wet, dark of the bush of the Coromandel hills, blind and fearful of death, and the tiny, blue, luminescent points of light of glow worms marking the edge of the trail; it is like the orange fungi, smaller than half a little fingernail, growing from rotting wood in long, lush, green, wet grass, each a white stalk topped by an orange honeycomb of flesh; it is like mycelium crawling as an unseen net through soil and leafmould, intertwining with the roots of trees, the biggest living thing on Earth; it is the Eleusinian revival here in the world of weaponised consumerism. The tide has turned.

Dhiraja