The West Highland Way or The Yellow Brick Road

This morning I took the yellow brick road, the vertiginous Hillside Road just behind Barrhead, which leads up to the braes. Indeed, all the paths I take are in some way yellow brick roads in spite of the glaring fact that they are neither yellow nor made of brick, or even, in most cases, roads. The path (the West Highland Way at Craigallian Loch) I took yesterday (after I wrote this piece) was indeed yellow as the winter sun fell upon it. But this is the thing with the original yellow brick road is it not? It's not a road. And it leads to the wizard, the wise and the hardy (all wild creatures necessarily being both by inhabiting the open), in the Emerald City (which of course is not a city but a forest, the country, the green). And so, in order to get home, in order indeed to home, and in order to become wise and hardy to realise that one's home is everywhere, and that every act of aliveness is an act of homing, one must reconnect with this 'Yellow Brick Road'.

Fells & Fjords: Glasgow's Vital Statistics

I can't stop singing the praises of Glasgow, living as she does so near to these wonderful hills. Ok, so maybe, these lumps and bumps are just 'vital statistics' in a more telluric form. But so what. So what if I have transcended my own species and fallen in love with the land herself. This is what happens when you root (route) your self so thoroughly in the earth like I have done over the past fifteen years or so. You begin to grow again (as Nature intended), and source, and relate to the land directly, sensitively, and intimately. This sourcing is all important for it re-minds you (of how, what, and who you are). Your roots now feed the earth into you directly and not through the filthy prism of some madman's crazed ideas. And this food reveals you and the land to be one.

Life is Ecstasy

The poet Wallace Stevens once wrote that 'Life is motion.' I'll go one better and say that life is ecstasy, since all ecstatic being is a function of the self-locomoting animal. Man, however, thanks to his pseudo-technology that hi-jacks and weakens his body-mind-earth system, no longer self-locomotes but is 'transported'  ('deported' would be more correct here since in being carried man is forcibly re-moved from his natural aboriginal animal self). As a result of this deportation from his original condition of ecstasy, 'transported man' thus becomes super-conscious of life and his living, and subsequently craves the ecstatic union (that he has forsaken) through external methods like drink, drugs, sex, and music. Man has forgotten that simply going for a walk (cycle) in the hills, unworlded and self-cleansing, emphatically primally energized, will do it much more effectively.

Me & My Bike

Today, I took a picture of me and my bike with the shadow of my head framed in the frame. I called it Me & My Bike or Mike for short.

The Toboggan Run

 

Normally, I would just cut through the forest part of PCP and take the direct line from the southern entrance near Haggs Castle Golf Course to the train station at Pollokshaws West. But they're working on the gatehouse near where I normally exit, and so I took a new route following the road round and going across the wee bridge at Pollok House. I never knew there was a route here (red line from top joining up with red dotted line to train station) that exited right next to the train station and which offered pastoral scenes en route (the forest route by contrast was always hemmed in by the trees themselves and by the increasing amount of leashes and dog-walkers on the path). And so, I called it the Toboggan Run because of the muddy corridor part of this route covers. But apart from this little bit it really is a galactic run what with all this bucolic space and absence of dog-walkers (who are really becoming a menace not just to me but to the wild, ground-nesting birds, and their own aboriginal awareness).

Enabler

 

Universal L.A.W.S. & Attending to your Roots

Like trees, animals have huge root systems. People have them too, although under 300 years of industrialism, these root systems have deteriorated significantly. Not so with the animals and the trees who have, despite man's efforts, still maintained an intimate relationship with their Mother. This is because root systems depend on motion to evolve. And plants and animals have never relented to becoming passengers in their own bodies by subscribing to a technology (of transportation/eco-deportation) that weakens and eventually destroys the body (and its environment) entirely. Without motion, or if that motion is hampered in some way (by comfort, ease, and convenience), the root system is damaged and cannot grow as it should. More than this, root systems depend on universal L.A.W.S. This means light, air, water, space. And if these elements are contaminated in any way, again, the root system suffers and cannot grow. This is why mankind is in such trouble, because his root system has been severely damaged by 300 years of brain-washing, body-washing, spirit-washing via science (a reduction of natural con-science), progress (a deformation of universal circumgress), and capitalism (a counting of heads: a perversion of people into cattle). His (natural) motion, (natural) space, natural light, air and water, have all been industrialised and thus contaminated. He needs to get back out into the hills, into space, into the light. He needs to start moving as Nature intended (and not as some corpulent heart and brain-diseased capitalist intended). He needs to eschew comfort, ease, and convenience, or if he does accept them, to make sure they are borne on the back of hard (natural)work and hard-ship. When this happens, his root system will begin to recover and grow back. Soon, man's roots will resemble those of a plant's if not a tree's. He will hear the Earth once more speaking through his feet, and when he does he will realise the error of his ways in the flesh. Place will become dear to him again because his roots will penetrate deep into it as he moves across it bodily. And when the land and place are embodied, the body expands and grows. A growth that eventually gives birth to greatness. Which then encompasses the whole Earth.

Animals and plants are still largely 'in the Earth'. Man, with his hubris and his hi-fi thinking, is now 'on the Earth' as in occupying it (parasitically) and not inhabiting it (symbiotically).

The Chameleon

Never apologise... never drive... never fly unless you have wings.... never clean your bike!

The bike blends in when it is left to its own devices. The bike like the body cleans itself as it goes. Ok, so I may need to turn it over at the station before the train arrives to give it a quick exfoliation but it runs like a dream caked as it is in dry mud. And it looks the part. Ain't nothing so disappointing than seeing a clean bike. It's like going into the jungle and seeing tribal people wearing perfume and designer gear. It just isn't natural. 

Being a chameleon is hard work. On the ground, in the field, in situ...

The only cleaning the chameleon does is when he moves and cleanses his insides, or a few 'licks' here and there. The moving is thus the real detergent, and the land the chameleon moves across the real 'make-up' that the animal 'puts on'. Interestingly, the word chameleon derives from Greek khamaileon, from khamai 'on the ground, creeping', akin to chthon 'earth' + leon 'lion' (the large head-crest on some species was thought to resemble a lion's mane). Furthermore, the chameleon, or Earth-lion if you prefer, (like the bicycle if not the cyclist too) was supposed to live on air ('Excellent, i’ faith; of the chameleon’s dish: I eat the air, promise-crammed'. (Hamlet, III.ii.84–86). 

And so it is that my bike is a chameleon.