Whilst maintaining a ritual of monday mornings in the hills - what better way to start the week! - I headed up to the holy rock of Duncarnock Mount. And man was it windy! Yet, this is how you develop your relationship with the elements, with the animals, with the land and the sky. By simply being with them.
I have many 'lovers' so to speak, none of them actually human. I spend time with them, these non-human amateurs, I listen to them, I rest and play with them. Occasionally, I will also talk to them.
Man, by and large, has lost these relationships to the elements and to the land. He is involved now in a coagulated and incestuous set of relationships with his own domesticated kind (I also include dogs and pets here, and any kind of de-wilded creature exploited for its companionship) that does nothing for his expansive self, his telluric self which has grown out of the earth herself.
As such, the human has amputated his self and become -man. Yet, as David Abrams suggest in The Spell of the Sensuous, we are only human in contact and conviviality with what is not human. Without the soils and skies we are nothing. And yet we treat them with disdain with our boxed-in-ness and our non-thinking. It is only by coming into the elements, getting away from the noise and your own mutilated kind, that you will have any chance of hearing the voices that speak to you from afar. That you will have any chance of truly thinking. A thinking that is as much space as it is thought.
It is only by living openly, that you will begin to welcome space into your brain. It is this sort of thing that led Ortega Y Gassett to proclaim:
I live therefore I think.
One of those purely unintentional 'hanging-your-wet-gloves-on-the-nearest-plant' moments atop the blessed Duncarnock Mount.
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