Twelve and a Half Per Cent


Three hours is about the average duration of my pastoral excursions inlucing getting the train to wherever I'm going. Normally, I'm on the bicycle or on foot for between an hour and two hours, not much more. So, today, I was out the door for 10.30am and back for 1.15pm. Less than three hours. And yet, in those three hours, I managed to get up into the desolate moors behind Barrhead, Johnstone and Howwood and enjoy (and be en-joyed) by all that space, silence, solitude, and a flying locomoting-localizing body. In those three hours I traversed the universe, or equally universed the traverse. This is the beauty of cycling/walking in  these spaces: the Trinity (self-locomoting, self-localizing, self-locating) unites, and one becomes (truly) One. This is what we have lost as a people, as an aboriginal animal navigating its way through the planet: this Oneness that arises spontaneously out of the naturally-abiding. When you escape the noise and the ferrying devices, and start doing things on your own, primal things like moving and 'bodying forth' in primal spaces, strange things start happening to the body-mind. It begins receiving a power that appears to come straight out of the earth itself, and that clarifies. This 'power' helps us to see Reality as it is, and tap in, now rooted as we are through locomoting in space, to the one underlying phenomenon. It is a power that we all should have, and yet do not, for our infantile fascination with the car destroys it. If we can't devote a mere three hours a day (that's 12.5%) to our own body's galvanizing system then you don't deserve a body. It's like buying a lamp and then never plugging it in. What's the point in having the lamp in the first place?

Even an agent gets twelve and a half per cent. Indeed, this is what 'agent' means: 'one who acts,' from Latin agentem (nominative agens) "effective, powerful," present participle of agere "to set in motion, drive forward; to do, perform; keep in movement".

The real 'driver' drives his own body, not some machine that pollutes his environment and dismisses his body.




















No comments:

Post a Comment