When you are rooted in the reed-bed of Reality, knowing what to be and to do comes naturally...
Belden Lane
I made a mention the other day that these routes around the strath are actually roots. They root you in the reed-bed of Reality. And, as such, knowing what to be and to do is a piece of cake.
I am a flower. Who grows out of the strath. Who flows and flies, and, occasionally, flowers...
The Reality here is Nature. There is no other reality. The wind, the land, the mind. All together.
Inhaling. Exhaling. Hale.
The other context that people think is reality, the workaday world and the world of entertainment and technology, is really a curtain pulled over your eyes and over Nature. It is, as Kenneth White was apt to say, a 'diminished context', and one that destroys and destructures the natural world. It is a world of conveyance and machines, and pollution. Conversely, the natural world is a sphere of locomotion, flesh, and self-cleansing. It is a world that grows you, and which receives that growth for itself.
The routes that I have plied over the past decade in and around the strath have rooted me like no other in this vast natural sphere. My epiphany of 2007 in a forest in north-eastern Poland (the map is not the territory, I am) has continued to grow inside me and shed all kinds of blossom along the way. I knew that the only way I could uncover myself from beneath all that capitalist 'education' (I was actually educated by the Jesuits!) was by uncovering and undressing the strath, by clearing away the obstructions that prevented my roots from making radical contact with the Earth and with Reality. Not once in my ten year tenure at St. Aloysius as a boy did my teachers ever take me into Nature as part of my education, in spite of the fact that the grounds of my preparatory school in Langside had its own bucolic woods. Not once did my art teacher point out of the classroom window in Hill Street (in Garnethill) towards the great bank of fells to the north, and say... There is your education! No art can touch it!
It was only when I had faith in myself, when I took that leap not to be rich on the outside, upon disabling the ego and realizing my fundamental animality, that I began in earnest to cycle and communicate with the strath as a whole. Consequently, the root zone - a natural parliament of communication - expanded.
We are as plants after all - it is plant-life that gave birth to us - and we would do well to pay them more love. When plants and not people become your teachers you learn more deeply, and more rhizomatically. Your thinking moves. It feels its way through Mind as a root finds its way through soil. Your brain is a fertile field ready to be sown with seminal ideas.If you tend to them and water them well, these ideas will grow into trees, and maybe you yourself will become a hillside, or a stream.
The systems in nature (there are no things) refer us back to the systems that encompass our very selves. They point us back, as Lane writes, to the reed-bed of a common connectedness.
'We've been separated from the source of our identity and have to fall in love with it all over again.'
This is the reason why so many chase after Love. Because they have been removed from it. To be 'in love' is to be in communication with the matricial Earth and your myriad relatives. It is to be 'in Mind'. To flow, to breathe, to stand under...
Identity is not what you put on, nor is it what others graft onto you.
Identity is what you take off. It is what is left behind when there is nothing left.
Except roots that move.
Me & the Red Kite on the Campsie Dene Trail...
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