The Sky-Seat at Cuilt Brae

[W]e need community of the soul. Whatever our religion or lack of one, we need spaces where we can take rest, compose and compost our inner stuff, and become more deeply present to the aliveness of life. We need to keep one eye to the ground and the other to the stars. We need to learn that when we let loose our wildness in creativity, it is God-the Goddess - or call it Christ, or Allah or Krishna or the Tao - that pours forth. It does so from within as a never-ending river.        

Alistair McIntosh, Soil and Soul

Every person needs a perch.

And no meditation on Greater Glasgow's elegant and curvaceous body would be complete without a brief rest upon the perch par excellence, the sky-seat at Cuilt Brae. Nestled on the edge of Mugdock escarpment, the views north to the Strathblane Hills are seriously inspiring. Beneath us is the quaint little village of Blanefield nestled in its own little portion of the exquisite Blane Valley.

It's a beautiful cycle up from Glasgow following the Kelvin cycle/walk way up to Maryhill and beyond. Or, equally, jump on the train with the bike and get off at Milingavie. It's only a short cycle from here (maybe 5km) but the first half is all uphill towards Mugdock village before taking the Old Mugdock Road - aka. the helter-skelter - downhill to Cuilt Brae

You could, to make a circular route, follow the West highland Way up by Craigallian Loch and then just before it emerges onto the B821 road (at the top of the map) take the little path that doubles back up into the forest where it connects with Cuilt Brae (top centre of picture overlooking Blanefield). And then take the Old Mugdock Road back up to Mugdock and down to Milingavie.

Through the woods of Mugdock.... like travelling through the womb.

The sky-seat(s) at Cuilt Brae, and that mind-opening view....

 'Geo-Joy-ology' : A Geology of Joy.  [The Strathblane Hills from Cuilt Brae]

The Prayer of the Heliotrope

'The Flow-er'

Our failure to see plants as living creatures, and to appreciate ourselves as some kind of sped-up plant, is the result of limited human perception, a sign of the boundaries of our senses or the degree to which we have allowed them to atrophy, or the fact that we have become too speedy to perceive the slower rhythms of other life forms.

The Walling of Awareness, 4 Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Jerry Mander


After abandoning the car some ten years ago (like the television some years before that), I feel as if I have become more plant-like as a result, altogether more epiphytic, and actively drawing sustenance from the larger plant upon which I am growing (as non-parasitically as possible).

This fresh plant-like perspective has enabled a more profound understanding of the subtle movements - the slower rhythms of other life forms - that exist within nature as a whole, and how they interact, cultivate and exploit. 

Two of the most exploitative inventions of the 20th century, the internal combustion engine and the cathode ray tube, have with their indulgence of speed transformed this plant-like perspective to one which is polluted to the extreme. The result being that we become too 'speedy'!

No wonder we live in an increasingly anti-religious society. Speed and 'god' are like chalk and cheese. The ultimate ground of being can only be reached through stillness and contemplation. The question of religion is not pertinent to plants because they are religion. This (!) is what religion is.  Spontaneousness. Absence of artifice. Total loss of self.

Moving under one's own steam (work done in gratitude) might thus be described as some sort of 'prayer' through which the sacramental act of energising one's self is performed; not for any particular purpose other than perhaps to celebrate one's capacity to do so; a spontaneous prayer, absent of artifice, one which, to paraphrase Berry's verse below, illuminates the place where you are as everywhere.



Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in. 
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Wendell Berry

The Loss of the Locomotive

Life is motion.  Wallace Stevens


Today, whilst browsing the shelves of Glasgow University library I came across The Human Brain, A Guided Tour, by the eminent English neuroscientist Susan A. Greenfield.

Opening it purely at random, I came across this, on page thirty-four:

Although plants can move in the sense that they may turn to the light, they cannot generate movements as we do. Outside the realm of science fiction, no plant locomotes from one place to another. In clear contrast, all animals are on the move - that is, they are animated. Interestingly enough, the Latin animus means ‘consciousness’… The importance for moving creatures of having some kind of brain is best illustrated by an observation initially made by the late Emperor Hirohito of Japan, for whom the study of marine life was a passionate hobby. The tunicate in question is known as a sea squirt. When it is an immature larva the sea squirt spends its time swimming around: not only is it capable of coordinated movement but it also has a primitive vibration-sensitive device, crudely comparable with an ear, and a primitive light-sensitive device, roughly analogous to an eye. In fact the sea squirt could be said to have a modest brain. However, when it becomes mature the sea squirt changes its lifestyle and attaches to a rock. It no longer has to swim around anymore, because it now lives by filtering seawater. At this stage the sea squirt actually performs the remarkable act of consuming its own brain.