Croy to Stirling via Laniakea

It's no surprise that I started off this blog a few years back with 'le grand boucle' between Croy and Lenzie (via paradise). There's something about the route up into the Campsie Fells (here, the Tak Ma Doon drove road) from Kilsyth that inspires and motivates, and moves. I never knew about this road until my brother did it and told me about it (way back in 2010 I think). Since then, it has been an annual pilgrimage, not just around the Carron Valley but straight through to Stirling (on the backroad to Bannockburn). It is a route that I travel a few times each year simply for its immensity of vegetable serenity. I have yet to encounter a more tranquil path into the hills.

 Matching socks and horizon on the tak ma doon...

The plateau of the immense...

Just over there, in the Lewis cliffs behind North Third Reservoir, is where Alejandro González Iñárritu filmed 'The Revenant' (ahem)....

The revenant (the white man after winter) by the Bannock Burn...

The train station, the Ochils, and some domesticated grizzlies in Stirling....

CROY TO STIRLING VIA LANIAKEA

It’s not possible to put into words
the three hours
from ten to one
this blustery January morning
penetrating the horizon
beyond the horizontal
dissolving body, melding Mind
flowing flowering cycling
breathing flying landing
(God is a verb didn’t you know?)
seeing the valley from space
through the fells and falls of the cosmos
only one word,
perhaps
the only word:
Laniakea

Cycling the World

Having worked (as an EFL teacher) and wandered abroad for the best part of the last 20 years I thought I would scour my (digital) photo albums for bicycles that found there way into my photographs without my really knowing it. 

 

























Two zero heroes in As-Salt, Jordan, July 2006.

  

Rabat, Morocco, October, 2005.

 
Bialowieza, Poland, August 2008.


Swarzewo, Poland, August 2008.

 Uppsala, Sweden, May 2007.

 London, England, May 2012.

Budapest, Hungary, February 2007.


Cairo, Egypt, May 2011.

 Cairo, Egypt, May 2011.

 Soller, Mallorca, Spain, April 2013.

Olympiastadion, Berlin, January 2009. [The Olympic Stadium is behind us, the building in front being one of Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation]

Munich, Bavaria, Germany, December 2007.

Al-Suwaidi Camp, Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia, November 2013.

Dammam, Saudi Arabia, November 2013.

Amsterdam,  February 2001

Immergo Ergo Sum

I plunge into therefore I am.

I immerse therefore I unite.

Immerse is not a verb I hear very often. Emerge, sure, but immerse, not so much. The former means to come out of, the latter to plunge into.

I have maintained throughout this blog of the importance of one's own energy. Immersion is then the synergy that unites you, the energized entity, and the world of energies that you immerse your self into. There are no defining lines that can now close you off from the world. Movement is everything.

Indeed, earlier on in this blog, I presented the example of the incurious sea squirt who, having excreted its now superfluous brain, attaches itself to a slimy wall and stops moving entirely. The world of the sea squirt shrinks to a dot.

Yet, the more I cycle, the more I plunge into not just 'world' but 'cosmos' too. Organs of perception are made ever more wider until I perceive everything that is, which is of course at the same time 'I'.

I plunge into therefore I am.

I mean, surely that's the meaning of life: stream-lining, fine-tuning the self until it merges with its Origin?

The Beauty of the Box Junction

This is the beauty of cycling: the openness. Without it, I would never get to grips with things like box junctions, or lampposts, or pavement kerbs. Indeed, all three of these perhaps deserve their very own post for the import they bring to the world of the cyclist.

Here, however, it's the beauty of the box junction that I want to extol, not least because it is an oasis of space at all times, but also because of its very aesthetic: a virtual painting, more Mondrian than Pollock, sitting there on the tarmac canvas of an intersection.

This intersection too has import, for without it there would be no box junction. The intersection is a meeting of ways, a moment of consideration and compromise, and of clarity, and as such, a fine emblem to paint or talk about.