Here, you can see the shortish circuit that is this particular route (routes, if you have enough of them, are roots!). I cycled and walked this one, but you needn't take the bike at all.
In Belden Lane's Backpacking with the Saints, he remarks in the chapter on solitude, that the life of the soul thrives in community, but it begins with a radical aloneness.... The only true self we have to give is one that is grounded in a solitary life.
I'm not quite sure how radical your aloneness is when you've got a dog yapping at your heels (sorry Belden, but you asked for that one), but up here, away from all the pseudo-tech, and pseudo-humans, we have both the radical as a rooting and a recollecting, and community, as in the communities of insects, plants, and birds...
But it's true that without the solitude to attune... the radical would soon disappear.
Remember, these hills are where Patrick made his cell, beneath the stars, up there in the desertic moors of heather, listening to his self. It is why I come up here - to Listen. Not to anything in particular, but to the universe as a whole.
Indeed, listening may well be the 'principal sense' for attunement. The tune after all is not something we see or touch. When you come into the hills, alone (really alone, no dog, no tech, no BFF), and as often as I do (I am spoiled for choice living where I do in the middle of a strath), you soon tap into your deeper, wiser, self... This is where your listening comes in, as this oracle talks to you. I find myself having conversations in mid-air that are not entirely pronounced by 'me'. Indeed, it is the locomotive force, it is the land's curves themselves as I walk steadily across and through them, it is the water falling from the jutting braes, it is the new ten foot deer fence the farmers have just slung up, it is the stonechat who has just come to inspect me after checking me out for the last hour sitting quietly on a dry stonewall. All this is listening, or as Heidegger liked to say, hearkening, as in a powerful attentive hearing.
I find that in order to hearken which is not simply listening, one needs to sweep clean the mind of any possible intrusions, no matter how slight. But you cannot do this by thinking it. This is where your locomotive force and ascending come in. They stop you thinking. They bring along a new kind of 'thinking' that is more bodily than heady.
By bodying forth through nature, alone, and without the possibility of another person crossing your path (it is quite surreal at times at just how people-empty these peripheral hill ranges are considering how near the city of Glasgow is), your senses come alive, become attuned to Nature (beyond 'world' and into cosmos, the beautiful whole) and Self. The athleticism of the body gives way to an athleticism of mind. One actually enters into a greater Mind once the exit threshold of the ego has been passed. One begins to commune, quietly, with everything. One's mind becomes areated, ventilated, fresh and lively. Just like one's body. One begins to hear as if for the very first time.
It is amazing how eloquent the earth can be when your ears are awake.
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