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?

Twelve and a Half Per Cent

Three hours is about the average duration of my pastoral excursions inlucing getting the train to wherever I'm going. Normally, I'm on the bicycle or on foot for between an hour and two hours, not much more. So, today, I was out the door for 10.30am and back for 1.15pm. Less than three hours. And yet, in those three hours, I managed to get up into the desolate moors behind Barrhead, Johnstone and Howwood and enjoy (and be en-joyed) by all that space, silence, solitude, and a flying locomoting-localizing body. In those three hours I traversed the universe, or equally universed the traverse. This is the beauty of cycling/walking in  these spaces: the Trinity (self-locomoting, self-localizing, self-locating) unites, and one becomes (truly) One. This is what we have lost as a people, as an aboriginal animal navigating its way through the planet: this Oneness that arises spontaneously out of the naturally-abiding. When you escape the noise and the ferrying devices, and start doing things on your own, primal things like moving and 'bodying forth' in primal spaces, strange things start happening to the body-mind. It begins receiving a power that appears to come straight out of the earth itself, and that clarifies. This 'power' helps us to see Reality as it is, and tap in, now rooted as we are through locomoting in space, to the one underlying phenomenon. It is a power that we all should have, and yet do not, for our infantile fascination with the car destroys it. If we can't devote a mere three hours a day (that's 12.5%) to our own body's galvanizing system then you don't deserve a body. It's like buying a lamp and then never plugging it in. What's the point in having the lamp in the first place?

Even an agent gets twelve and a half per cent. Indeed, this is what 'agent' means: 'one who acts,' from Latin agentem (nominative agens) "effective, powerful," present participle of agere "to set in motion, drive forward; to do, perform; keep in movement".

The real 'driver' drives his own body, not some machine that pollutes his environment and dismisses his body.

Triple Fresh: Cycling in the Rain

Cycling in the rain is not just refreshing, it's double refreshing (or perhaps even refreshing squared). Not only do you get the freshness of a light rain cooling you as you go, but you have the freshness of your own cardiovascular system arising in the form of endorphins and the like. This was the case this morning. It hadn't rained all spring and then on the first day of summer, yep, you guessed it, torrential downpours all over. Ah, the Glasgow patter...! At any rate, it's not just the freshness that I enjoy (and am en-joyed by), but the fact that when it rains in Glasgow, everyone stays indoors. So, point two of cycling in the rain: no people, and no five metre leashes cordoning off the paths. Then  we discover that when it rains there is more oxygen in the air. Each time a raindrop hits you, you are pumped with a shot of O2, which for a cyclist is like smack to a junky. Not only this, but you have the concomittant effect of being wetted and not sweating and thus not losing fluids as might be the case on a warm sunny day. All these things, combined with the emptiness of paths and country roads, and the freshness attained from the rained upon locomotive body, gives us our triple fresh status (or perhaps even fresh cubed).

Unstoppable

It occurred to me this morning when cycling that I was in the flow, the flow being that of never stopping and of being that is unstoppable. Of course, at certain points during my pastoral excursions, I pause and stop, dismounting from my metal pegasus to walk alongside her, or sit by a verge. But even during these pauses there is no stopping. This reminded me of an epiphany I had when I was a child gazing out of a stationary bus window. I must've been about twelve or so, but I clearly remember the moment when I realised that nothing actually stopped, that everything even those stationary vehicles sat at the red lights opposite were moving if only at an infinitesimal speed. Indeed, the very act of coming to a halt and of denying the great cosmic flow I realised was a veritable sign of stupidity like denying the presence of the sun. So, it came as no surprise to learn that the word 'stop' and the word 'stupid' were not so far removed etymologically. Stop derives from Vulgar Latin stuppare 'to stop or stuff with tow or oakum' as in to plug and stop something flowing, but the very act of attempting to stop the flow is a sign of stupidity, is it not, for the flow, no matter how hard you try will always keep flowing. This leads me to the conclusion that all car drivers (as opposed to cyclists) are necessarily stupid because of all the 'stopping' they have to conform to in the shape of red lights, people crossing roads etc. etc. Cyclists by contrast never stop, because they are always in the flow - the flow being being that is open that is 'flowing and flowering' because of its openness and its self-propulsion. Car drivers, conversely, are closed; they neither flow nor flower because they are propelled passively by a pollutant that destroys their own bodies and their land. Their brains suffer too as a fucntion of their bodies since all brainpower - all cognition - is a function of locomotion and of self-propulsion. So, as far as this is concerned, car drivers are not just stupid and stupefied through the act of being carried and prammed, they are exponentially stupid for being closed off, removed from their own cardiovascular and respitory systems, and for destroying their matricial land that feeds and shelters them. Stupidity cubed in other words which amounts to severe brain damage. This is all because of man's capacity to stop.

And is it not a matter of truth that man's environment has been destroyed because man has managed to learn via science (and the concommitant absence of con-science) how to 'stop the flow' and 'dam' Nature up, not realising that Nature cannot be dammed and that she will always find another way? As far as this is concerned, man's learning to stop is also man's learning of stupidity. And this has caused him to stop his self and plug up the flow that energizes that self. The human stops flowering and becomes man, a fetid stagnant entity that feeds off its host plant like a parasite. This is why man, under the remit of science and not conscience, in the undertow of the pollutant pram and not his own universally flowing body, is dammed.