The Light of the Worms

I visited the Te Anau Glowworm caves when I was ten years old, and I haven't been the same since. The pitch darkness was a world I had never been a part of: above ground, we are always surrounded by stimuli, by noise, by sounds, by conversation, by images. Down there, there was only blackness and small pinpricks of light given off by often forgotten and despised creatures. Underground, the glowworms were the only beings that held any power: they were the only ones among us who knew how to live in this unknown environment. We could walk along the manmade pathway and board our boat for a finite tour, but these glowworms could survive in the pitch black nothingness with nothing but their own body as a tool.

We began our journey to this new world with a descent down a slippery staircase, lit by our tour guide's headlamp and accompanied by our own apprehensions. The cave smelled weird, the air was damp, and we were in search of something so seemingly mundane: worms. I was not excited by my parents' choice of excursion, and I would have preferred to be back in our rental car with my earphones plugged in to my brand new iPod.

Upon boarding the boat, I was even more underwhelmed. The only thing down here was darkness, and lots of it-as an impressionable ten-year-old, darkness was still a scary concept that I preferred to avoid. The boat bobbed along the river-if you could call the slender stream of cave water a river-as I grew increasingly bored with the lack of scary monsters lurking in the darkness. Soon, though, tiny, almost imperceptible beacons of light began to appear. I wasn't sure at first if the total darkness was playing tricks on my eyes, or if the boat had in fact taken me to some strange other planet. The drops of light started to become bigger, and I found myself surrounded by the most incredible feeling: the cave was giving me a completely new experience and exposing me to a world I had never known.

Eventually, we returned to the aboveground world we call home. My family briefly talked about how "cool" the tour was, but for me, the tour was something else: it showed me a brand new world whose realities I had no conception of, and I was hungry for more. I yearned to keep searching for these new worlds, and I thirsted for these new experiences. The simple glowworms gave me the gift of curiosity, and I will never forget the new light I found in that dark cave.