Thinking about underground paths that we don’t see and rarely think about I started thinking about animals that live underground and exist largely undetected. This led me to think of worms, who are blind and exist by instinct, and then to wormeries, created by humans to observe these curious wormy creatures going about their subterranean existence.

Thinking about this instinctual / oblivious behaviour, and the addictive intrigue that it brings about led me to think of other ‘great adventures’ and to to the introductory text that was spoken at the beginning of many Star Trek television episodes and films, from 1966 onward:

Space: The final frontier
These are the voyages of the Starship, Enterprise
Its 5 year mission
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life and new civilizations
To boldly go where no man has gone before

Which is where the idea behind the adapted title of this piece came from.

As a child I remember trying to ‘dance’ worms out of the ground, pouring water on a spot and dancing on that spot in an attempt to replicate rain fall that would lure worms out (what I thought I’d do with the worms once/if they surfaced, I’m not entirely sure!). Anyway, thinking about it now it just feels like taunting the animals – raindrops keep falling on my head.

This led my thoughts on to other animals that live subterranean, parallel lives to ours and yet are rarely noticed by us led me to think of moles. Like worms they’re also blind, and pretty harmless yet seen as pests when they ‘surface’. Consequently horrific traps have been created to capture and kill the moles, and they’re used on a domestic level by ‘normal’ people who seem to think that such behaviour is acceptable… Another parallel, this one with human behaviour and intervention – with the way in which some people think that it’s acceptable to interrupt the lives of others and treat fellow creatures.