... clockwise and counter-clockwise turning ...

When I was young, each Christmas Day and on some other days too we would get in the car and drive seven miles or so to the next town, Raetihi, to have late middle of the day dinner at the house of our friends, the Lawns. They lived on the other side of Raetihi, just near the beginning of the road that leads to Pipiriki, in a small wooden cottage up on a hill; with a tiny, enclosed back lawn, hedges along three sides and the back of the house the fourth; and an image I have carried with me ever since is of myself and my sisters and the two Lawn girls, turning one afternoon on the Lawn's lawn. Enclosed gardens were and perhaps still are common in that part of the country, often but not always the hedges were made of macrocarpa, still used as a windbreak on many of the farms. Wonderful hedges that you could crawl right inside of and then along; hedges where you'd find bird's nests with eggs or baby birds still in them; hedges where hedgehogs really did live. The image of us kids spinning on the lawn until we fell over dizzy and hysterical with laughter is one that I retain from our own grander garden at the Burns Street house; but that isn't what I'm trying to recall here. It's something different, something not quite so manic, another order of ecstasy perhaps: we are long and tall and pale of skin, luminous as norns in the gathering dusk; the tremendous sky of those parts is close enough for us almost to touch its pearled blue-green air and yet as far away as the first stars just beginning to prick through; and we are dancing on the lawn as if at once unconscious and supremely conscious; as if, knowing nothing, we know all there is to know; as if the highest sentience is found in the most spontaneous action. I'm one of the kids on that tiny back lawn up on the hill behind the house at Raetihi; yet what I see in my mind's eye is a view from above as the pale children turn and turn, overcome by a solemnity that we will never remember, never forget; then the view suddenly telescopes and, even though the size of the children doesn't diminish or not much, I'm rushing upwards, past the hedges, past the treetops, past the mountain and past the sky itself; finally, strangest of all, the thought comes that, alien, native or sojourner as I may be, in this image is the essence of the life on earth that I have known.