The Beckoning: From City to Space in a Matter of Minutes

Entities in motion transcend their own already achieved degree of actuality in being drawn into an ever intensifying being.

Philosophy, God, and Motion, Simon Oliver

...philosophy is essentially , at least at its beginning, a search for the origin, and it is in this sense that one could say that every human being is philosophizing - insofar as it is always and from the beginning unsettled about its origin.

Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out

When you go into the land as often as I do, every day practically, into the hills, the gentle peaks, the quiet lanes, the lochs and shores, you sort of realize a different universe from the one that presents itself to you in the nature-depleted city. That goes without saying I think. Yet, there is another dimension to going into the land that is not so obvious, not so much in the way (ob + viam) as the very way itself, of which 'you' are a part. This is why the wandering Jesus could say I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, and why another aborigine (are we not, at heart, all ab-origine?) Frans Hoogland, living in western Australia, can say:

…we have to walk the land… when the land start pulling you, you’re not even aware you’re walking - you’re off. You’re gone… you might follow the eagle flying… then another might grab your attention, and before you know there’s a path that’s created  that is connected to you. It belongs to you and that is the way you start to communicate with the land, through your path experiences. You become very aware about yourself. You start to tune finer and finer. Then you become aware that when you’re walking the path, it’s coming out of you - you are connected to it. See, you are that land, and the land is you. There’s no difference…

The draw and pull of the land. The lure of the local. The Way of Being.

The Swedish vagabond-writer (and Nobel Prize winner) Harry Martinson once wrote something very similar way back when he was tramping the back roads of his native Sweden, that the path was 'coming out of you'... that the path wasn't out there, that it originated within and came out of you as you moved. 

The origin is the engine in other words.

And the engine is your own locomotive-locating force.

Much of this origin, however, has now been hijacked and corrupted by modern day comfort, ease and convenience. To the point where we now think of land and human as separate, just as we 'think' that the path and the walker (or cyclist) are separate. But of course, we're not thinking, are we? We're just hanging on to second hand protocols, and dusty conventions handed down by even dustier people, which do nothing but further jeopardize the land and ourselves. Thinking emerges out of solitude and space. And one's own locomotive force. To give these 'qualities' up is akin to committing something of an existential suicide. Akin to lobotomizing oneself. Which may explain the prevalence of depression and ill-health pervading our apparently 'first-world' and 'developed' society. 

Yet, the answer is never far away. The greater Glasgow strath abounds with opportunity to 'unformat your disc' and cleanse the self of the distortion and pollution that modernity has imposed upon you. Today, it was a short cycle (no more than 8 miles or so along flat car-free paths) from Dalmuir train station to Loch Lomond (and the train back from Balloch). An hour and fifteen minutes is all it took me at a gentle pace, and it was all I needed to open up that third eye called Mind (or equally Heart). The 30 minute train journey back passing hills and estuary affords all the time required to harvest those endorphins and set the world aright again.

In brief, the beacon (Lomond, from the Scots Gaelic, Laomainn, 'Beacon'  ...) beckoned.  And I went.

 The idyllic little Bowling Harbour, a paragon of peace on a quiet March weekday morning.

With excellent views across the estuary to Barscube Hill (at 194m, one of the finest small hills in the world!), and Knocknowe plantation behind Kilmacolm.

The black River Leven and the empty path aside it, that runs all the way from Dumbarton to Balloch without so much the smell of a car exhaust. The bird activity in the herbaceous borders was incredible, so take the bins with you if you're keen on getting closer.

Loch Lomond. I arrived at around the back of midday and have never seen the place so quiet. Perfect! And if you're still on withdrawal from the city, there are shops and cafes, and Sea-Life...