Knowing All About It

Wisdom consists in perceiving that opposites, far from being sequestered in their exclusive individuality, ceaselessly modify and communicate with each other. The one never transpires but in response to the other, and all reality is nothing more than this process of reciprocal engendering.

Francois Julien, In Praise of Blandness

Up only exists because of down, not in spite of it. 

On a bicycle, or on foot, this process of reciprocal engendering is something that etches itself into the bones, brain and blood. You breathe those ups, you breathe those downs, because it is you, your blood and your bones, that works them, not sitting passively by, sealed behind screen and speed, as you let some machine do it for you. Moving under your own steam, the shape of the bodymind is thus governed by the shape of the land.

Because of these live-contoured-encounters, and this dynamic inter-influencing of bodymind and world, you soon understand that unity (or, com-unities), and not duality, governs the universe. Organism and environment, together, constitute a single evolutionary process.

A unity of opposites naturally emerges.

'Knowing All About It on the Loch Humphrey Path'     July 2013

Jolomo's Bicycle

The other day whilst coming down from the Kilpatrick hills, I passed through Clydebank and saw that there was an exhibition of the Scottish artist John Lowrie Morrison in the museum. I popped in to have a shuftie, and came across this early one (dated 1975), apparently done on the hoof, of Old MacQueen of Castleton. Granted it's not what you would typically associate with the colour-saturated tableaux of his later croft and seascapes, but this, for me, is one of his finest.

 

Old MacQueen of Castleton - John Lowrie Morrison, 1975

Sacred Cycles

There is something mystical about the bicycle, something mysterious about the way it conjoins with the body to move one forward through the creation of circles and spirals. I often wonder if the bicycle is the secret of the universe, hidden in plain sight, that few have yet noticed, for its capacity to energize, inspire and enopen.

Personally, I am convinced that it is.

'The path that can lead to liberation should be seen less a straight line, pointing forwards or upwards, but more as a spiral pattern of winding and intersecting loops, a string that unravels constantly through space, time and consciousness.'

Aidan Rankin, The Jain Path

Road Closed?

 'Crow Road - Closed?  Aye, right!'

A big red ‘Road Closed’ sign impedes the way. Apparently there’s been a landslide. From time to time, even the land moves at a pace we can recognise. I carry on up the road not so much ignoring the sign as amusing at it. When you walk with your own two feet or use a bicycle, (when you traverse this earth under your own steam and not outsource it to some lugubrious, over-sized machine), you quickly realise there is no such thing as a ‘road closed’ - indeed the concept of closed roads and closed-ness quickly becomes absurd. You find that you are open to everything, that nothing is ‘closed’, not the roads, not the hills, not the skies or the coast, nor the myriad forms that inhabit it all. Everything is emphatically open, and connected.

In this way, cycling is as much metaphorical and metaphysical as it is literal. One creates one's own path without being dictated to by rigid legislations. Car drivers, on the other hand, are so hooked in to the system of outsourcing that they have no idea whether they're coming or going. My father once told me (possibly the only words of wisdom that ever exited his mouth) that buying a car means connecting yourself to a system that constantly bleeds you dry (he was talking financially, via insurance, road tax, MOT, parking, fuel...) but he might as well have been talking psycho-physically. Following my own stints of working in countries like Libya, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia (countries not generally recognized for their road-safety records or bicycles) I understood not just the financial dangers of owning a car but the very real (meta-) physical ones too.

There are no 'dead ends' on a bicycle, no bottoms-of-bags (culs-de-sac) that you find yourself in, that dictate to you where you can and cannot go. There is a freedom to cycling that you could never ever get from a car, not in a million years. In all my years of cycling, (yes, I may have had to throw the bike on my back for crossing a stream or hiking over a hill), I've never had to stop and turn around because of a way that is closed. When you follow the way of the cycle, the cyclical way of bodying forth under your own steam, the word 'closed' never enters the equation. As the old Zen saying goes: the obstacle is the path. There is always a way forward.... (on a bicycle)...

Signature of a Flow-State