A Cyclist's Heart

Recently, upon looking into the anatomy of flight, I discovered some interesting facts:


1. A bird's heart is on average 40% larger than the heart of a mammal. This is because flight requires incredible circulation.

2. Flight burns up enormous amounts of energy. Birds consequently have very efficient digestive systems. To stay as light as possible, they don't have the luxury of storing energy. Only during migration do birds begin to stock up.

And then, I thought, why not substitute 'bird' for 'cyclist' and 'flight' for 'cycling'? After all, and as I've intimated elsewhere on this blog, cycling is a form of flying.


1. A cyclist's heart is on average 40% larger than the heart of a non-cyclist. This is because cycling requires incredible circulation. (And also because he has not closed himself off to his environment, sharing a fundamental and vital solidarity with all living breathing creatures).


2. Cycling burns up enormous amounts of energy. Cyclists consequently have very efficient digestive systems. To stay as light as possible, they don't have the luxury of storing energy. Only during migration do cyclists begin to stock up.


Much better, no..?

The Way of Air & The Receiving of the Rain

Under the tutelage of Nature, the aimless saunterer (or cyclist) learns (or recollects) the art of receptivity, of opening his soul to the immesaurable density of reality. 

Daniel Conway, Answering the Call of the Wild




The old German cobbler Jakob Bohme once wrote in his obscure treatise on God that one needs to pass through hell in order to appreciate heaven...

The dialectic of paradise is such that one needs to have tasted hell in order to know the taste of heaven. And it is here, that taste, in the air around us, in that freshness that blows into our nostrils and through our whole bodies.

Glasgow is an airy place no doubt, but not all places have that vitality of breathing. When I lived on the Mazovian lowland in Warsaw, an area known for its flatness and lack of undulations, there was a distinct windlessness that entered the proceedings. The flow of fresh air just wasn't there as it is here in the Glasgow shires. The topography and the hemmed in-ness of Warsaw meant that wind was something of a luxury. Summers could get awfully muggy and close, and there were times, in spite of the lovely warmth and sunshine, when I prayed for a cool breeze.

Living in countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Libya, I have realized that fundamental dialectic of heaven and hell. I can now see greater Glasgow, with its gentle hills and moorland, its proximity to the highlands and the islands, its gentle rains and winds, its shifting light and cloudcover, as that heaven. Who wouldn't, having felt the pain of fifty degree sunlight burn your skin? Or the suffocating humidity of a Jizani soiree in south-western Saudi Arabia? There are life-giving properties here that you just do not have in certain locales around the world. The west of Scotland where I live and breathe is particularly endowed with these qualities.

Yet one must learn to receive the rain, to welcome the wind.... and to understand it. And the best way to under-stand anything is to stand under it. To feel it. To develop a relationship with it as one might with another human being. These elements are your relatives before any of your own kind; they allowed you and your human relatives to emerge. These elements, then, are your greater relatives that precede all others.

However, we are been covered up and coated over with all manner of fashions, so as to prevent this tuning in to the weather. It's probably why our delusions regarding global warming are still prevalent: we cannot feel the weather anymore. Our lives are too air-conditioned. Our brains too washed with over-chemicalized shampoo.

It's the difference between being awake and being alseep - between synergetic Being and soporific Being. All these wind and rain proof tops surely bode no good for the oneness of organism and environment. I am the rain, a wise creature once croaked. And I am. For without it I would not exist.

Our psyche, after all, is a function of the air that blows through us, that feeds and nourishes us. This is the word that is used to translate the Hebrew word nephesh from the Creation story in Genesis 2.7:

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

The soul emerges out of the air and the rain and our interdependence on them. Indeed, soul may well be this deep reality that nothing can exist without everything else. That I am both that nothing and that everything else. That to confuse this closed bodily form (or this fine-tuned ego) with I is to make a grave mistake and launch oneself onto the path of a slow self-destructuring where one ineluctably becomes a dislocated fragment, an inauthentic mask imposed upon a faceless origin.

Broadband of the Bodymind

You can learn a lot from a computer, from its make-up, its workings, and how it's put together. The bodymind is a lot like a central processing unit for instance, except far more complex than any computer man could make. It has bandwidth, it has the capability of speed, of quickness and sharpness, and it can be infected with all manner of viruses that can slow it down and if not attended to eventually kill it. Yet, the bodymind is not a computer in the traditional sense, to think so is to lead yourself down a dangerous path; it is far more than that.

Broadbanding the mind is the key to understanding how much more the Mind is, and the best way, in my humble opinion, to do this is to 'space out', and literally free up space in (de-fragment) the Mind. Most people these days have a very narrow bandwith to their Mind, very little head-space to fly about in and contemplate. This is due to our over-reliance on analysis and calculations, planning and operational thinking, effectively un-presencing ourselves by focussing on the future. This metaphysical removal of ourselves from ourselves leads to 'action', and all action is karma. When we are fully immersed in the present, when our mind is disinfected from the future, our bandwith like our Being becomes broad and sharp.

But what, I hear you ask, is the best way to space out. Lots of youngsters immediately think drugs: ecstasy, after all, is offering you that ecstatic experience, to step outside of this manufactured ego-driven self and become your (real and true) self, and to a large extent it succeeds, but the problem with chemicals and psychotropic substances like ecstasy is that they necessarily affect your system in other ways, that the ecstatic experience you have garnered is predicated upon an equally un-ecstatic experience which drug takers will no doubt identify with the working week that follows the weekend, a week-long comedown. When, however, you glean that ecstasy not from some muppet in a jester's hat in a darkened discotheque but from the earth herself, there is no comedown. The ecstasy lives within you, albeit at times on a lower frequency. It accompanies life and enriches it, whether that life be your own, or other lifeforms that you encounter along the way. The ecstasy is, you realise, within you. You don't need a pill to unlock it; all you need is a little discipline, a vague outline of the way ahead, a pair of legs, and some gently rolling hills with plenty of space. 

The shape of space shapes!

For someone living in Glasgow then, a valley-city surrounded by bucolic shires and slow undulating hills, the ecstatic experience is never far away. 

The other day, upon watching a snippet of a television program, a youngster was heard saying that she thought 'hiking was pointless'. These are the same youngsters that seem permanently connected to their techno-prosthetics, and who have been weaned on a thousand flashing lights and noises. Of course, something like walking in a forest  or on a hillside (for someone who has never even been introduced to one) would appear to the most boring thing imaginable. Yet, it is not the hillside or the forest that has become boring.... but one's brain and Mind. To call walking in wilderness pointless reveals the extent to which mankind has been removed from his own deeper self, that primal savage for whom walking in wilderness was a matter of survival and vitality. Now, we exist not in spheres of aliveness and organicity, but in boxes of concrete and polysterene. The whole 'pointlessness' of hiking is the point! Within that unoperational thinking, space appears, bandwith expands. And the bodymind reaches out to take hold of itself...

Body-Washing: Brainwashing via the Body

At no point before in what we call civilization and the first world has our collective health been in such turmoil. Many of the foodstuffs imparted to us via large corporations should have government health warnings in the same vein as cigarette warnings. Indeed, heart disease is now the biggest killer, not due to smoking or lack of exercise, but due to the shit we eat. And it is shit. I often think (and this is not America!) when gazing at some of the labels and contents (most of which are cleverly concealed) of ready made meals and the like that they should be illegal, or at the very least their producers should be closed down and prevented from ever touching food (and food labels) again. All manner of dodgy tactics are used by these corporations to sell you this stuff, tactics that reveal an ethical and moral vacuum in their CEOs. Nowadays, it's like walking through a minefield trying to find that piece of fruit that has not been sprayed and infected with all manner of chemicals, or trying to find a loaf of bread that is really brown and not just brown on the outside! It's appalling what people will do to each other in order to have that fourth Rolls Royce, or that third holiday home on the Algarve... Greed is now a virtue in our over-whacked society, and if you do not aspire to be rich (in the poorest sense possible, that is, financially) then clearly there is something not quite right about you. Our economy seems to positively encourage the tricking of the consumer, whether it be through downsizing products without telling you, or telling you that it's fat-free when clearly it ain't. I'm all for personal responsibility and eating and drinking responsibly, but that door swings both ways, and if our producers and corporations themselves are not responsible, then what hope is there?

We are being slowly and horribly brainwashed via these over-chemicalised and over-worked foodstuffs. Food affects the brain like no other, and if you spend your days eating nonsense, then your brain will spout an equal amount of this nonsense. Never trust a fat philosopher, goes the old maxim.

So, buyer beware... no take-aways, no ready meals, no kebabs dripping with all that lovely fat...

and go easy on the wine....

and of course always remember the Upanishads:

First, know food...
By food all things live
Towards food all things move
Into food all things return....