Smiler

To smile is to wonder. This is what smile means coming from the Latin mirari, to wonder. Animals perhaps do not wonder as people do (not a bad thing because it does not carry them away), and so do not smile. But maybe the smile is not a good thing. Maybe the animals do not smile because they are still in touch with their animal and healthy selves. Maybe man smiles because he thinks he knows something (or doesn't know something). Either way, the thinking is the problem. So, maybe the smile is not a good thing. Maybe, like the green light, it gives the go ahead for more 'pollution', wonder itself being a sort of polluting of the aboriginal mind. Or maybe, I'm just glad to get away from the pollution. Which is why I smile every time I'm in the hills.

A Moveable Halo

The halo confers wholeness upon the animal, or is it the other way around? At any rate, all animals have halos for they are already whole and unsplit by artifice. Animals still breathe as Nature intended, they locomote and move under their own steam. They do not emote like man does for their moving blood dispels such pathological acts as emotionality. Nor do animals ego for they already go. By contrast, Man has thrown his halo in the wheelie bin and bought a car, or a gas chamber if you prefer that has now replaced his heart, and by extension his brain. Man's spirit is thus nowhere to be found for it is buried beneath so much nonsense. The halo which is there to crown the spirit is also nowhere to be found. But for those who still breathe, like an eagle breathes, like a leopard breathes, the halo is never far away.

Improvised Cycling: Dunlop to Neilston

I'm an improvisor, a gifted creator.. all I know is that we are constantly being born. This is a line in Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game, spoken by an imitable John Malkovich in the movie of the same name. It's a line (and film) that has stuck with me for some of these pertinent insights. Because we are being born at evry moment, this is what Nature is, birth, birth... birth. Look the word up if you don't believe me. And so it is, that we are all improvisors and gifted creators, and if you're not then you've been barking up the wrong tree and aligned yourself with a system that does not renew you at every moment. So, when the train conductor closed the doors on me at Barrhead station yesterday I had no choice but to get off at the next station some six miles down the line at Dunlop, and improvise. Luckily, I know my routes, and there is a lovely cycle route from Dunlop to Neilston on the old drove road that Rabbie Burns et al. used to take from Ayr. It's completely car free and people free and full of widescreen views across the shires. What's more, I had the wind directly behind me and it was a gust. The route took less than an hour though it appeared timeless when I cycled it. I arrived at Neilston train station to see the train arrive and then whisk me down to Muirend via some breathtaking vistas across the strath. At Muirend, I headed thru Newlands and into Pollok Country Park. I was home before I knew it, and yet...

Beauty on the Back Roads

 

'Oh what joy it is to have leave for living,' wrote Nan Shepherd in The Living Mountain. And what more living and aliveness do you need than the moving blood and the pumping heart refreshed and reinvigorated by the body's own locomotion and its entrance into the bucolic. Passing through a shower as it passes through you is an experience that brings you closer to the Earth not further away from it (as driving in a sealed up gas chamber does). Inhaling the Earth and not your pollution makes you 'hale' and whole, and healthy. This health from your moving blood flushes illness and the ego out, renders you sane and clean. While the opposite can be said for those who do not move their own blood but choose a pollutant to coagulate it. So, don't be 'mental'... be elemental! Cycle, don't drive. Those who mote do not e-mote, those who go do not e-go...