4 hours, and it feels as if I've crossed the cosmos... and in a way, I
have. Yet, I've only cycled from Barrhead up into the hills behind
Neilston and returned via Pollok Country Park.
And yet, the wonders I have beheld en route....
It's amazing how a little locomotive force, a little flying and soaring (did you think cycling was something else?), through car-free (care-free) back country lanes with views over the whole strath, can transform and transfigure.
Taking a step back is essential in order to see the whole. And if one steps back 'far' enough, one might even see oneself, as perhaps the land and the animals see us. Coming up here, then, to the rim that encircles this grey-green bowl, is far enough to envision our Self, space and peace enough to begin communicating beyond our own kind. When you live in the city, such communicating is nigh on impossible. All we have is pets and people, no real animals. Existentially petrified and pet-ified, their lives revolve around a fabrication called the 'ego', a non-natural construct that has emerged out of the unnatural (anti-Nature) society that predicates itself upon the destruction of habitat (what did you think 'construction' was if not the flip-side of destruction?) in order to propagate its own kind beyond natural limits. 'Home' has been corrupted in the most heinous way, by boxing us in, in apartments (being apart), or detached (not together) houses. We can already see through language, in the detached and the apart, the corruption of the whole - the together - of the communing and communicating. Indeed, this fragmentation is only spurred on by false technology which sees people (especially youngsters who clearly do not want or know how to respond to their environment) being ferried about, with their ears plugged in and eyes nailed down, as if in pressure suits.
The long and short of it is that people are in a stupor. Stupidity emerges. Obesity rears its ugly face.
The body-mind is corrupted.
Cycling round the strath, pausing plenty to take in those views, inhale that air, and maybe even write down some wayward thoughts that I have encountered en route, gets rid of that stupor and its resultant contagions. We emerge out of the abberation called the city, and soon find ourselves emerging too out of its alienated correspondant, the citizen. In our coming out of the city to its peripheral hills, we start to be-come something else, indeed something that is not 'a thing'. The thing (as well as being the third greatest horror film ever made) is a construct of man's unnatural world. There are no things in Nature, only systems in touch with other systems, only relations and relatives.
Family then, in its widest possible sense, begins to appear on the horizons. It may be brother sun or sister moon (another great film, Zeffirelli's Brother Sun Sister Moon about the life of Francis of Assisi), or your animal brethren. It may be the soil itself, the hills, the streams, the flowing sky. And what of the plants and grasses. They are all your relatives without whom your life would be a lot less vibrant. Surely, by now, with all our cleverness, we know of the transubstantiation of grass into flesh.
I've never understood why you would want to diminish such a glorious context, and reduce it down to two screaming weans and a wife that wants to kill you by nagging. And I haven't learned from my own mistakes. I've learned from other people's.
There is a heft (for those who have insight) that comes with living in society and being part of what they call 'civilization'. Our comfort is built upon the suffering of others, whether that suffering is of the land itself and its soils, or of animals that have been unceremoniously evicted from their habitat because we need to build more pokey housing schemes and motorways. Cycling the back-roads of the Glasgow strath has enopened me to animality and the land - in short, Nature - in a way that I could not have imagined ten years ago.
I have begun to see family in a wider sense, in the shape of the cosmos. I no longer feel confined to my own kind or my own planet. I am a universal life-form who has shed his skin through his own systemic forces, who has re-moved his construct through the simple act of moving.
Yet, the construct is as sturdy as a house, and it will take much effort and time to dismantle and demolish it. It will take even more time to allow the bare ground left behind to flourish once again. But it will. All you need is faith. In Nature. In your Self.
And most importantly, in the brakes on your bicycle!
