Ranger

It's hard to believe the wingspan you can have just by using a little imagination, and your own two feet. My wingspan is now as large as an eagle's what with my discovery of the 'brain' (bike + train) about a decade ago. Yesterday for example, on a routine rooting, following my taproute, I embraced a home range that covered:

2 cities (Glasgow, Paisley)
3 towns (Johnstone, Bridge of Weir, Elderslie)
4 villages (Linwood, Brookfield, Howwood, Kilbarchan)
3 golf courses (Ranfurly Castle, Ranfurly Old Course, Elderslie)
6 farmsteads (Auchensale, Lawmarnock, Law, Dampton, Monkland, Burntshields)
3 weather systems...

and maybe even a couple of time zones.

All this in three hours or less, using my own heart to power me, my own mind to imagine the route in the first place, a couple of short train trips (from Dumbreck to Paisley Canal and back again), and a bicycle to extend that ranging. I left my flat at 10.30am and returned at 1.20pm (having done the long way, the shorter way getting me home half an hour earlier). 

The rest of the day is spent eagle like, resting and perching and envisioning (from all that vision I gathered this morning). There's simply no other way to be.

The Glow of Go

Glasgow, I just realized, having written this title down two days ago, is one of those words (if not entities) that has great things hidden inside it. With its circumambient array of hills, braes, and fells, Glasgow is the glow of go. You cannot do anything but go in Glasgow given its hill-strewn nature, especially if, like me, your third leg is a bicycle. And if you go, you necessarily grow, since going is the operating system of growth. And as all beings know, if you grow, and thus share a universal solidarity with all things (except 'man'), you necessarily glow. This is your 'cosmetic', not out of a tube but straight out of the cosmos itself: the glow of go, the glow of growth, the glow of Glasgow. In this way, the universe lives in the lining of your skin.

8,500 Hours of Flight Time

That's how much training the pilot (Zobayan) who crashed the helicopter carrying Kobe Bryant, his daughter and 7 others, had. And I wondered, how many hours of 'flight time' I had under my belt. I also mused that no matter how many hours of flight time you have you are never immune to having an accident no matter how good you are. The crucial difference here being that if I crash on my bike, it's rarely going to be life-threatening.

So, then, how may hours, how many months, how many years? For a fifty year old who has been cycling since he was a boy, it might take a little guesswork. But it should be around the mark. If we take an average of 2 hours every other day which makes an hour a day (which doesn't seem untoward), over a period of say thirty years (I took some time out during my college years and when working abroad), we would get a figure of around 365 hours x 30 which gives us 10,950 hours of total flight time. That's barely a couple of thousand hours more than Zobayan in his helicopter. 

According to author Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours is the 'magic number of greatness'. To be sure, I feel great when I'm on my bike, but I don't consider myself as a harbinger of greatness. Such thoughts set one up for a fall, usually one involving broken bones, and I'd like to avoid that if I can. I consider myself proficient, not great. I know my way about on a bike, and I know how to go from A to B on one, but I still have slips and accidents. I am still very much aware that it can all go pear shaped at any moment if I'm not paying attention. I have only ever been out a couple of times, maybe three or four, where I have turned back because conditions were too severe. That's really saying something when cycling in Glasgow's temperate climate. But I guess a helicopter is a whole different ball game, one which a cyclist like me who has some degree of attachment to the ground, would not be happy getting into. I would suggest that even 100,000 hours of training in a helicopter would not prepare you for a whiteout or a sudden storm that reduces your vision to zero. The problem with helicopters is that unlike a bicycle, you can't just stop when conditions go topsy-turvy. You can't just get off and walk. In a helicopter, like so many other modern technological devices, there is no 'stop and get off'. And if there is no SAGO, then you're in trouble. Cause that means you're hooked into a technology that is navigating and moving for you.

To paraphrase Krishnamurti: it is no great measure of health to master a completely unnatural and contaminative way of moving. Better to remain natural. And the bicycle is that natural.

'Never fly unless you have wings' says the Buddha of Barscube Hill. Wiser words have never been said.

Dumbreck-Out !

In the office.... the travelling office... working hours 10:47-11:00, and 1.00-1:18.....

That's all the time you need to come up with a great idea and get it down onto paper.... especially if in the interim 2 hours you have cycled through the universe....

This is my taproot.... the cycle route from Paisley Canal train station to Bridge of Weir and then up to Barnbeth and Auchensale, round to Law, down to Kilbarchan, and then back along the Sustrans path to Paisley Canal. It's a leisurely 90 minute to 2 hour route, and without cars. Mostly, it's an opportunity to get back into the primal and that primitive activity of locomoting through a natural landscape. Whether we like it or not we are still primitive creatures in spite of all this nonsense that science can throw at us. The real technology is the body and its communicasting (communicating even) with essence and Nature. All other technology is necessarily false and thus destructive. So, where locomoting through a semi-wild landscape renders you alive in your most primal sense, not locomoting through it renders you unalive. This is what has happened to us: we have abandoned our own bodies and been body (mind) snatched by idiots pushing their machines and ideologies upon us. I mean, think about it, our lives are governed by dead men, men who thought that this or that system would be good for us, but which wasn't. And yet, we still labour under it, this age old draconian system of capitalism, of land-destruction, of animal objectification, of racism and industry. None of this stuff is applicable nowadays, since we all know better, and yet, here we are still suffering under it, being governed by the manic dreams of dead white men. So, by all means escape and break-out, and begin with primal moving through primal landscapes. In spite of my living ten minutes (cycle) from Glasgow City centre I can get to Paisley canal in 20 minutes from my gaff in Cessnock via the beautiful little train line that stops at Dumbreck. Even if I cycled it would barely take me half an hour. And then from Paisley Canal it's primal all the way through a corridor of a million trees that obscures any built-up environment that may be lurking there behind them. Forty minutes from Paisley Canal and I'm in the zone, physically, spiritually, universally. That's all it takes, an hour or so to 'arrive'... Some people spend that just staring into the mirror in the morning.

The Perfect Head

I shaved my head yesterday for the first time and today I took it out for a cycle. It felt great bobbing through the sky naked. And it looked great too, smooth and uniform compared with the tufted crabb grass look it previously had. In fact, it looked positively phallic in its newly smoothed status. And this got me wondering.

As a cyclist 'heading' into the hills, am I not then in some form of intercourse with Nature? Is Nature not in fact 'giving me head' by my cycling through her airs and rains and elements?

Is this not 'existential intercourse' (as opposed to the sectioning variety) where the head being given excites and stimulates the bodymind to the point where it dissolves into the universe and becomes it? Is not the whole body then the phallus in perfect union with Nature through the galvanizing act of self-populsion in natural media? And is this intercourse not rewarded with a fresh conceiving of the Self if not an 'immaculate conception' where the universe is birthed through 'Being that is aligned with its essence'?

Have we not then in misunderstanding the Nature of intercourse and of giving and receiving head failed to give birth to ourselves? And in doing so, have we not made the colossal mistake of giving birth to aliens?