The Two Legged Revolution

In Masanobu Fukuoka's wonderful book The One-Straw Revolution, in which he extols the virtues of natural farming methods, he writes:

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.

I kinda feel that way about cycling...

Pure cycling.... that does not require the over-accessorizing of the cyclist, that relies on traditional navigation: map-reading, recognizing landmarks, and being aware of the movements of birds and animals; that explores the local from a focussed centre, radiating concentrically...

In a 1982 interview with Mother Earth News, Fukuoka said that 'the real path to natural farming requires that a person know what unadulterdated nature is, so that he or she can instinctively understand what needs to be done - and what must not be done - to work in harmony with its processes'.

To be sure, unadulterated nature is a rarity in a world that has been ordered by man, but there are moments in even the most defined landscapes, of wildness and a sense of the pristine. The tops of hills, or even their slopes, can allow a sense of wilderness to enter, can uncontaminate the self.

And Fukuoka speaks of agriculture as a Way: 'To be here, caring for a small field, in full possession of the freedom and plentitude of each day, every day - this must have been the original way of agriculture'.

Just as cycling is a Way: To be here, caring for a small locale, in full possession of my wits and dynamism, this must have been the original way of human beings.






Icy Ecstasy up behind Howwood


Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.

Roald Dahl




Even with a broken bottom bracket, cycling under your own steam beats being carried in a car any day of the week.... ;)


The Lochliboside Hills and the Ferenese Hills up behind Glasgow (particularly Barrhead and Paisley, up behind the braes of Glennifer) is mostly rolling farmland but there are a number of spaces that have been left to wild out, let's say. Once you get up behind the braes avoiding all the main roads quite easily, it is a remarkably quiet and inspiriting place... in all kinds of weather. The coagulation and noise that we had been so used to down there in the city disappears entirely to leave you more open to a meditative-spacing out state...



























A snow-capped Mistylaw in the distance, part of the Inverclyde-Muirshiel range.





























Lochwinnoch in the foothills, looking over Howwood Fishery...



This particular road is one of the quietest I have ever cycled. It's a sort of link road between upper Howwood and the farms up and around Walls Hill Fort. Simply being on it, and especially with the primordial aspect afforded by WHF and the distant snow-capped peaks, is a magical experience. And all this not half an hour from Glasgow by train + bicycle.




Balance: The Bicycle Vs. the Tricycle

When Confucius was asked on his death bed what word if any he would choose to sum up life he said, 'Reciprocity'. He might as well have said 'Balance'.

It is remarkable these days, how unbalanced man has become, how out of kilter he has allowed his self to become with regards to the Earth that feeds, clothes and shelters him. His work seems to consist simply of toil that does not nourish his self, indeed, which acts as a barrier to knowing his self, so that he can make money and 'do things' that merely exacerbate this barricade, distracted as he is by the seductive pleasures that society has devised to keep him slogging away.

The modern world of man is a world of lunacy, a world of concealed directives and subroutines that positively encourage man to unattach his self from Nature and from the Earth. Capitalism then provides the stabilizers at significant cost not just to the person as a financial construct but to the person as a sacred and healthy being in touch with all that breathes. It is a remarkable situation no doubt, one which man apparently cannot see beyond, but one which is not beyond cure.

Balance is the first dynamic you encounter when you learn to ride a bicycle. Reciprocity too. On a bicycle, moving under your own steam, you quickly learn that the cold can be warming, that the prevailing winds both push and pull, that going uphill invariably means there's a downhill somewhere along the way. One learns not so much of pro-cesses as of circum-cesses. This is because we are energising our selves, engaging our own engines, and not allowing anyone to surreptitiously tack one onto us. It is primarily because we have allowed our own internal engines to be compromised that we have lost touch with this circumcessional interpenetration, and our balance. That we have become unstable and volatile. We are, like all these crappy TV shows tell us, like the walking dead, except we do not walk, we are carried.

For those of us who allow our self to be carried (remember that car is short for 'carraige'), and who cannot balance by themselves, for those infants who are too afraid to even try, we require stabilizers. Stabilizers that usurp our own vital synergies. This usurpation causes a bicycle to become a tricycle, and a human to become a man.

Nowadays, a person out walking on their own is a sight to behold. No dog, no pram, no iphone.... A remarkable sight indeed. A man who can balance without the existential stabilizers. However, this is the exception. Just take a look around you, at all those tricycles, all those Sisyphean forms being pulled by dogs and pushing prams because they do not know how to propogate and procreate outside society's hard-boiled super-impositions. Man has become a standalone entity, or at least has become deluded into thinking he is. But of course he isn't. Where man considers his self to be separate from the rest of his species and acts accordingly, the human considers his self not just to represent his own species but to represent all species. This is when the 'special' arises, when this great breakthrough is made. Only then will man revert to human and to a being that is both indigenous and universal, stable and 'in tune'.

Then, attuned to the greater nexus that envelops you, and with all the stabilizers removed, it is simply a matter of cycling....



Beware of any technology that is not your own... External technology disables, internal technology enables.


God Bless the Gulf Stream! Govan to Gourock One Sunny November Morning

It really is a beautiful cycle.... a beautiful metaphor too... cycling out of the city through the countryside down to the coast. It's mid-November, and it's 14 degrees! God bless the gulf stream!!

Living in Govan is absolutely perfect in terms of hooking up with trains or cycle paths to all the compass points around the city. On this particular trip, I take the train from Dumbreck to Paisley Canal (13 mins.), though it is a perfectly good cycle on the National Route.


 Henry the Heron waiting for lunch on the River Gryfe...



 
No dog, no pram, no ipod.... just a bicycle, a body, and an elemental mind.





Fields of Gold, passing Linwood and Brookfield.









Quarrier's Village with the Inverclyde Hills behind... A picture of pastoral serenity if ever there were one!



























The bourgeois enclave of Kilmacolm...





























40% I think it says, although someone has tried unsuccessfully to spray paint something over the 4 (I think with a 7)...





























A pair of goosanders in the bay at Greenock (its partner was just out of picture)...

 
 Greenock Harbour.




What can you say? A mere two hours cycle from Paisley and we're here, in front of the ocean and the mountains, confronting our greater stranger self.


Giro Ergo Sum


The more I cycle the more I realise, in the flesh, the fundamental truth of existence: the dialectic of movement and repose, of stravaiging and remaining...

It is because man no longer moves his self, and allows it to be carried, that man has found himself in a bit of a mess.

I say this in the same week that Donald Trump is made president of arguably the most powerful country in the world. A triumph for Trump perhaps and his brainwashed clan, but a great loss for sanity and for the earth as a whole. It kinda shows you where the man-world is - in a state of absolute desperation.

Why?

The simple answer, though it may seem absurd to say so, is because THEY DO NOT CYCLE!

Think about it....

After or during a long cycle...





I think therefore I am.... yet I cycle therefore I think....




LA in the Sunshine


This morning, buoyed by a mushroom trip that I took last night, and drawn out by that glorious November sunshine, I found myself in the woods of Pollok Country Park listening to leaves fall. Not ten minutes from my humble flat in Cessnock by bike. Amazing! Another ten minutes through the woods and I'm on the platform at Pollokshaws West train station. It's 11.55. The 11.57 to East Kilbride will deposit me at Thorntonhall at 12.10, and from there it's a serene cycle through idyllic country backroads with views down to the city, through the village of Waterfoot, and on and up into the hills behind Newton Mearns, specifically Hazeldean Hill and the back end of Eastwood Golf Course.

Cycling through sun-dappled woods on an empty Friday morning whilst still reeling from the residual effects of a 3.5g magic mushroom trip the night before is a truly surreal experience.



























A naked pedestrian bridge over the A726, marked on the map by a thin white line running up from Mearns High School, through a few farms to Titwood, and onto the Hazeldean road. It's a great little tractor path, but beware, if it's been raining it can get a bit muddy...




























Gradually I begin to understand this spot and its place in the greater landscape. I begin to feel an affinity with it, until I become assimilated and am no longer an intruder.

Ralph Storer, The Joy of Hillwalking




























Flagpoles with attitude: Queen's Park...



























Gazing across and through the city to the peripheral hills, notably the knobbly outlines of Dumgoyne and Dumfoyne at the north-western end of the Campsie Fells. Any city where you cannot see hills (or some form of countryside or coast) is not a city but a symptom.



























The pond at Queen's Park...




























Just across the motorway from this little drumlin in Pollokshields, Gower Street.... a view to rival all views! Having hills like this all over the city means having views that project and telegraph the eyes and mind... A hilly city is a far more interesting place than a flat one.