It's been a while (let's say a few decades) since I heard someone mention the Glaswegian word hameldamie. For those struggling with google translate, it simply means home will do me, and is used in response to someone asking where you're off to on your hols this year.
For a small boy who first heard this word, it was generally associated with poverty, and the inability to afford an exotic vacation abroad. To stay at home during the summer holidays in other words was considered abberrant, and the sole choice of those who had no choice. This state of affairs affected me deeply without me really knowing it, as things generally do. It informed my decision later on to travel the world by teaching English, and to get away from the 'poverty' of staying in my own country. Nowadays, things are a little different, as I can now see my 'home' here in a different light. One is bound to, after spending the best part of two decades living and working in a dozen, often wildly incongruous, countries.
Only long miles of strangeness can lead to one's home, writes Kenneth White somewhere.
Whereas once I was blind....
The Glasgow Massive
This week, so much immensity, whether the Campsie mesa to the north (above) or the expansive views from just behind Eaglesham to the south (below).
It is this immensity, this immeasurability, that man needs to tap back into if he is going to survive himself. Just being here forces the mind to space out, to fall into a spontaneous meditative way, to enrich itself. Too much calculation and analysis has impoverished the human to the point now where his whole world if not the entire cosmos is quantifiable and calculable. I am always slightly worried when people ask me how many miles I do when I'm out and about. I never count them, I reply. It's not about the distance, or the quantity. I have no idea how many miles I have done on my bike, but I do know that my body-mind appreciates it, the qualitative aspect that cycling through such serene and massive landscapes will confer.
Calculation separates. Meditation federates.
The way to the goal cannot be measured...
A Life in the Day
Sunday morning....
somewhere in a small quadrant of the Universe... a peculiar consciousness stirs...
slips on some lycra
has a cup of tea, a slice of toast,
wets his face, brushes his teeth...
saddles up.
Ten minutes later, through the serene tree-lined streets of Pollokshields...
and we're here, a passenger pigeon amongst passenger pigeons, on the idyllic platform of Maxwell Park train station:
As always, when your spacing is perfected , your timing too falls in line...
On the empty train - the travelling lounge - I open my flask of steaming java, open my book (Taoist Yoga), have a brief chat with the conductor, and relish the fact that we are ascending albeit gently to the foothills around Newton and Cambuslang.
Fifteen minutes later, I'm here at Newton, staring at the great constellation that is Dechmont Hill.
Up and around, like cycling around Saturn, I hit the downslope and the narrow Turnlaw corridor (closed to all who do not use their own steam to move). It's here behind a fence, in a nook, that I stop and open the flask again, and marvel at the span of the valley before me...
Down some more, through Cambuslang, and down again to the river - the great Ganges and the strong brown God that is the Clyde...
From here, the serene cycle corridors continue all the way into (and beyond) the city.
But I pass through the city, and into Exchange Square where there are some art stalls set up. I see a few pieces I like but I am reluctant to pay for art on the spur.
I move to the stall next door, where a young girl is trying to raise awareness for Woodland Trust Scotland. I am appalled that I am not already a member. I tell her of my run-in earlier in the week with the Forestry Commission up in the Kilpatrick Braes (off the Loch Humphrey Path) who were destroying the whole area with their heavy-handedness. The Woodland Trust is the complete opposite. It is sensitive, child-oriented, and actively educative taking children into real woodland (no more bloody plantations) and letting them uncover their selves and find their way with the appropriate guidance. I sign up immediately, and ask her if she can backdate it 47 years.
I fly back along the riverside stopping to have a Gregg's sandwich with the gulls beneath the Kingston Bridge. They fly with me as I race them along Lancefield Quay. The gulls win every time, and rub it in by laughing at me in unison.
I shake it off and head over the arc bridge and along Brand Street.. It's barely 3 O' Clock. Which forces me to ponder the cosmic timelessness of my journey...
Earth Phrenology: Minding How You Go and Learning to Flow(er)
It isn't what you know in your head, but what you've become that matters most... in backpacking as well as in life.
Belden Lane, Backpacking with the Saints
The Glasgow strath is truly a blessed place. Walking and/or cycling its gentle hills are a wonderful way to realize this. Not only is the weather perfect, pretty much all year round, for the human exercising his own locomotive force, but the air quality, the water quality, the Quality in general, is far above any other city I have had the good fortune to live in. My only complaint is that Scotland's forests and woods have all been circumcised quite badly (by sheep, deer and people), over the last few thousand years, leaving behind them only plantations and scraped earth. Yet, we are trying, to reconstitute these forests (at least we should be) so that one might in the words of Thoreau 'enter the universe through a forest wilderness'.
Up here, in the moorland above Lochwinnoch, there are no forests, but plenty of hills. Ladymuir plantation in the photo below is in a state of being harvested (most plantations have a lifespan of 30-40 years), and so is quite an unsightly picture, as most mass graves are. That being said, the views up here are spectacular, and in spite of the Muirshiel Visitor Centre being only a kilometre away, no-one really comes up here any more.
Looking south-eastish down towards Kaim Dam with Ladymuir Plantation on the left.
From the path to Windyhill looking north: The curiously sounding Craig of Todholes (left), Little Craig Minnan (centre) with Kilmacolm in far distance.
As regards the title ' Earth Phrenology' I've always though of these lumps and bumps, and the more acute mountains to the north, as part of the Earth's cerebellum, and thus part of our Mind. Indeed, it has always fascinated me how Mind constitutes itself, and how the land, the animals, and the elements are a part of that constitution. Mind expands - becomes more spacious - the more I come into these airy spacious realms, full of life and light. There is zero distortion, and plenty of open unadulterated space. Contemplation is thus a natural spontaneous event up here. One 'spaces out', and in so doing, ejects the small self. What is left behind is Mind, no more no less, a constitution of epic proportions, qualitatively open, and so light that one might say that one no longer walks or cycles, but levitates.
From the path to Windyhill looking north: The curiously sounding Craig of Todholes (left), Little Craig Minnan (centre) with Kilmacolm in far distance.
As regards the title ' Earth Phrenology' I've always though of these lumps and bumps, and the more acute mountains to the north, as part of the Earth's cerebellum, and thus part of our Mind. Indeed, it has always fascinated me how Mind constitutes itself, and how the land, the animals, and the elements are a part of that constitution. Mind expands - becomes more spacious - the more I come into these airy spacious realms, full of life and light. There is zero distortion, and plenty of open unadulterated space. Contemplation is thus a natural spontaneous event up here. One 'spaces out', and in so doing, ejects the small self. What is left behind is Mind, no more no less, a constitution of epic proportions, qualitatively open, and so light that one might say that one no longer walks or cycles, but levitates.
Looking across to Mistylaw (left) and Hill of Stake (right) from Windyhill.
The word phrenology actually means 'Knowledge of Mind' (or as I prefer to translate it, 'Discourse with Mind') and if we can escape its early 19th century connotations with pseudo-scientific neuroanatomy, we can see that perhaps its usage is better appropriated for reading not the head of an individual but reading 'everything': as in the Earth, the matricial planet that feeds, nurtures and shelters us, and knowing 'it' as part of ourselves not through the scientific approach (which seeks to separate you from 'it') but through a con-scientific approach and through conscience. It is this conscience that is consciousness tapping into Mind.
It is the world's loss of conscience that allows so many of man's actions to be played out as they are. His existential responsibilities have been diffused through the capitalist model. If man were a conscious being who was rooted in the land, and thus rooted in Mind - a conscientious being - he would not be doing most of the things he is doing now. He wouldn't be driving (allowing his self to be carried by an air-polluting, land-destroying machine), nor would he allow stupefying technologies to usurp his own powers, or bury his self in a box for forty of his most awake hours of the week, performing a task so monotonous and irrelevant to his biological being that after a decade he is effectively dead.
The word phrenology actually means 'Knowledge of Mind' (or as I prefer to translate it, 'Discourse with Mind') and if we can escape its early 19th century connotations with pseudo-scientific neuroanatomy, we can see that perhaps its usage is better appropriated for reading not the head of an individual but reading 'everything': as in the Earth, the matricial planet that feeds, nurtures and shelters us, and knowing 'it' as part of ourselves not through the scientific approach (which seeks to separate you from 'it') but through a con-scientific approach and through conscience. It is this conscience that is consciousness tapping into Mind.
It is the world's loss of conscience that allows so many of man's actions to be played out as they are. His existential responsibilities have been diffused through the capitalist model. If man were a conscious being who was rooted in the land, and thus rooted in Mind - a conscientious being - he would not be doing most of the things he is doing now. He wouldn't be driving (allowing his self to be carried by an air-polluting, land-destroying machine), nor would he allow stupefying technologies to usurp his own powers, or bury his self in a box for forty of his most awake hours of the week, performing a task so monotonous and irrelevant to his biological being that after a decade he is effectively dead.
Man was not built for boxes, if indeed you didn't know that already. Man did not evolve either in order to perform work that is not essential to his living. That this essentiality - this Discourse with Mind - has been redirected (perverted even) by the capitalist model so that irrelevant work does indeed become essential to living (for the money alone and not the work) is a big part of the problem. In other words, if man's work means nothing, then man means nothing.
This is probably one of the root causes of man's dislocation from the land, his animal brethren, and Mind. His work no longer grows him. And if your work does not grow you, then you do not flower, you do not fruit. Man's frugality has been castrated by the capitalist model for its lack of monetary generation. Yet, the generative powers of this frugality outwith the crass profit motive is formidable. The more one pares away, and the more one 'skives' (from the Old Norse word 'skifa', to cut, to strip away) from the toil that is imposed upon you, the more frugal one becomes. And the more frugal one becomes the lighter one becomes, not just physically, but existentially too. This frugality has everything to do with being in tune with one's essence. Man is a plant after all (the word clan actually comes from the Latin 'plantare' to plant, the 'p' later being changed to a 'c') who has roots that go way down. Yet, as an astute mind once wrote, man appears to be the only creature who resists his own flowering. This is because of the choices he makes: to toil (and not to work), to have (and not to be), to accrete (and not to grow).
Outwith this frugality and flourishing Man has become mindless. His discourse with Mind has been squeezed dry by superimposed tech and mechanical thinking. No longer an animal among animals, he no longer walks or levitates (flows or flowers), but is carried.
Conversely, the human, the man who has not lost touch with the soil, his own included, is an endangered species, hunted and preyed upon by men who wish to extract his labour power for more of the non-essential.
The miracle of Jesus walking on water, is the miracle of being human, of living lightly and frugally, of flowing and flourishing, of being at one with Nature.. Levitation, the Austrian 'water wizard' Viktor Schauberger wrote, was simply the ability to feel the cosmic flow through a paring away of life's non-essentials. In other words, all animals levitate, except those in captivity, injured or in ill-health. Yet man struggles to even understand what levitation is, outwith the fantastical.
For people living in an around Glasgow, with such access to ''Mind'', there really is no excuse any more for the brainless and the mindless amongst us..
The existential imperative is upon us:
Mind how ye go!
The gentle yet powerful Windyhill.
Collecting & Re-collecting: First Trip of the Year
Buoyed by a small find up at Eastwood golf course earlier in the week, I headed up to my favourite spot, the magical ridge of Boglairoch, to see if my usual haunts were 'occupied'. Of course, we're talking magic mushrooms here... liberty caps.... food & insight. Normally, around the Glasgow area, mid-August is when they start appearing. Small flushes appear here and there but you need the eye of a hawk and the nose of a badger to find them. Later on in the year, September through to the first frosts of early November, they begin appearing more profusely, and are slightly easier to spot. Nevertheless, you need to know your territory, like an animal knows its home range, to uncover these little titbits of magic. And it's truly amazing how they appear in the same place year after year, the soil and the particular micro-environment being perfect for its flourishing.
Along the ridge of Boglairoch, they still appear, although the Forestry Commission have done their best to thwart this by staking ten foot deer fences right next to it, cordoning off what I once called in a poem The Wildflower Meadows of Boglairoch, for the planting of spruce trees, which of course never got past their initial stages due to the forestry commission's obvious ineptitude. Yesterday, I found only ten, but one of them was so big that it could easily have counted as ten on its own. Added to the twenty I found up at Eastwood I had myself a modest trip - a return (one hopes) ticket maybe not as far as Jupiter and the outer reaches of the galaxy but certainly to the moon, and maybe even to Mars!
It's a wonderful thing, travelling the valley for insight, collecting and re-collecting Mind. One sees things on mushrooms that one cannot see elsewhere. There are revelations, epiphanies, and insights. One quickly realizes that one's Mind has been kept down by a system of living that has been corrupted and deluded by technological grandeur, and pathological fixation. Insight reveals that all action is absurd, where action is a matter of doing that which is not essential. Insight also reveals that man is also absurd, for he acts, and he does, where he needn't have to. All agony stems from man's actions. This is the root of his karma...
Soon, with discipline (all psychotropic substances require it in abundance), and application of this fresh way of seeing, one can dispel karma entirely, and release the self from what Buddhists call the cycle of birth and death. When one is so released, one becomes one. For one is aligned now with the essential, and with one's essence.
This is the nature of Being...
At the top of The Bastard.... looking back down to a grey laden city.
The Amalfi Coast, aka. Port Glasgow, Greenock, and Gourock... ;)
Lurking in the undergrowth....
Thorntonhall Circular
A lovely wee route starting from the idyllic Thorntonhall Station. Just follow the quiet signposted roads to Eaglesham and the green route on the map below.... In spite of the motorway and the new construction of a housing scheme behind Eaglesham, this is a mightily quiet and pastoral route...
No words required.... just a few pictures...
The old Swan public bar in Polnoon Avenue...
A chance encounter with Lawrie and his dad at the top of Polnoon Avenue... I'm the one without the helmet!
They smell ma pieces...Help ma Boab!
The light up here is spectacular... the air too...
The table-topped Ballageich Hill...
The 15th Green at Eastwood Golf Course. Just walk through the course and over the fence at the end onto the road beside Hazeldean Hill, or if you prefer you can take the road that runs alongside the course down to Newton Mearns...
The Eight Map Man
The map is not the territory. I am.
The Eight Map Man (or Eighpman for short) is a term I came up with the other day when I realized that the terrain I was covering by bicycle, train, and foot, on a weekly basis, required 8 OS Landranger maps to do it justice. I had already identified this terrain some months ago when I did a post called Home Range, and was keen to find out just how large it was, say, compared with the range of an eagle or a large bird of prey. Or, for that matter, another indigenous human being who has not dislocated his self from his own locomotive force or his environment, and who regularly covers vast areas as he stalks and hunts across his territory.
Naturally, my 'hunting' and stalking' is not for deer or bear, but for insight. This is my food before all else. If I cannot see properly, then it stands to reason that my food might not be what I think it is. Our insight as a species has deteriorated in proportion to our being overwhelmed with technologies that propose to see for us.
I am a stalker (in the Tarkovskian sense) after all, someone who realizes the endgame of science, technology and progress, and attempts to circumvent it by doing what comes naturally, namely, locomoting through my territory, in search of 'food' and insight.
There are various definitions of what a home range actually is. Burt (1943:352) outlined the basic concept of an animal’s home range as we now understand it: That area traversed by an individual in its normal activities of food gathering, mating, and caring for young. Occasional sallies outside the area, perhaps exploratory in nature, should not be considered part of the home range.
It has also been proposed that the best concept of a home range is that
part of an animal’s cognitive map of its environment that it chooses
to keep updated.
As a species, it is worrying to see that we have lost touch with our home ranges, because we have lost touch with our auto-mobility (and allowed it to be usurped by machines which we have designed). A car or a conveyance device that subtracts your metabolism and vital force from you cannot confer a home range. Indeed, it destructures your home by carrying you and thus infecting your metabolism. A home can only be homed in on, by using your own steam. Any other way is simply delusion and detraction.
So the Eighpman is where I'm at for the moment. Or if you prefer, the landranger. Sure, I bend the rules a little, by taking trains here and there, within reason. But no cars. Where the bicycle is perhaps one of man's more noble inventions, the motor car is possibly one of man's worst (along with the cathode ray tube, and perhaps even the printing press...). It has divested the human of his soil, and of his contact with the earth. In effect, the motor car has unearthed the human and created man.
The question everyone needs to be asking themselves in this conceited and artificial world of carrying devices and their resulting pollution, is how expansive is your home range. Do you even have a home range? Or are you carried, like a big baby that has never been allowed to grow up, everywhere? Where do your horizons end? And what uninterrupted views have you of the place where you live? Indeed, and perhaps the most important question for someone who has abandoned their own vital force: are you even alive?
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