Out of the Shitty & Into the Clean

It's no surprise that the word city rhymes with the word shitty. After all, the city as a wasteful, crowded, and pollutive entity, shits all over the environment. The word shitty thus could well be an alternative spelling for the word city. But I digress. As a wild entity the pollutive is not to be accommodated, least of all celebrated. It is, rather, to be avoided. Why? Because the shitty shits all over your body-mind-earth system, fills you full of waste (that which is extraneous and non-essential), and filthies you to the point where you develop a tough external carapace that prevents the real from penetrating. This means that you can't see properly, you can't hear properly, and you can't understand properly. Your vision is thus limited and distorted by the filthy contaminated windows that you look out of. The key to cleaning those windows is Nature. Nature renews and cleanses. This is Nature's essence and all who bathe in it are reborn as pristine, spotless entities. But Nature does not exist - cannot exist - within an ever-filthying environment. Nature rather, like the wild animals - the ravens, the woodpeckers, the deer et al., exists outside the city. So, if you live in the city you need to go collect it. And it is only by collecting Nature, by moving through and with Nature under your own steam, that you will ever cleanse yourself and get rid of that godawful carapace.

Be warned. Cleaning your windows may involve receiving the rain.

Ten Points a Pump

Ok, so maybe this is a little hairy to turn into a game, but they've turned you into game so go figure. I'm talking of getting cars to honk their horn at you not to signify their opinion on any political matter but due to you outflanking them and annoying them as a wild cyclist. This may mean skipping red lights when they do not, or just generally irritating them by taking up the whole lane (to prevent dangerous overtaking). Whatever the case, in the wild cycling game it's ten points a pump, and whoever gets a thousand points (on a single excursion) first is the winner.

Skipping Red Lights

As a wild cyclist I regularly skip red lights because I can see everything. In a car, not so, because you're in a car. Sometimes car drivers will get annoyed at this and honk their horn, or, like the waiting car driver shouted today, 'red light'. To this I simply smile and tell them that as soon as they stop defiling the Earth and their own bodies, and polluting the air my children breathe (I don't have any children but for the sake of argument), they can skip red lights too. Boy, you should see their faces.

Cycopath not Pussyfoot

 

Holy moly... this guys looks mental! And yet...

This is the cycopath... the creature that cycles. He counts himself amongst the wild animals and the plants, and other creatures that cycle. Cycling you see has little to do with the bicycle and everything to do with attending to the essential and the wilderness within. This is the real excursion: the incursion within.. and you can only achieve this when you rid yourself of all unnecessary distractions, the frivolous and the non-essential. When this habit is retained through years of practice - when the habit becomes you so that it becomes your behaviour - then the cycopath is realized. And the 'pussyfoot' - those eco-existential infants who are carried, prammed, and stretchered, who no longer know how to walk (or indeed cycle) because their whole Being has been 'pussified' under the dangerous dialectic of ease-disease and Nature domination, annihilated once and for all.

Back to the Dome

What a great route from Kilpatrick train station to Milngavie train station via Duncolm (401m), the desolate Kilpatrick plateau, and the official middle of nowhere. Three hours is all it took and yet... such experiences cannot be quantified in temporal language. There is ecstasy up here in the solitude, space, and silence, and so necessarily one becomes extemporized and ecstatic. This is one of the many existential curiosities to be had when engaging the self in the wilderness: isolation. This is the true wilderness of your own savage interior, and it offers us the opportunity to explore it, and come to grips with our real self. So, excursions like this are not just physical, or indeed mental, but spiritual and existential. Going into the hills, and exploring one's own wild interior, has never been more urgent.

Cycling Meditations: Kilpatrick to Milngavie via Duncolm

(see route map here)

The Seven (Cycling) Samurai

 

The Length of a Shit Movie

79 minutes. That's all it took to cycle beautifully and languidly (granted, I had the wind behind me) from Paisley Canal to Langbank via Elderslie, Bridge of Weir, Kilmalcom, and Finlaystone Park. That's less than the running time of a shit movie. Or even a good one for that matter. But the real movie is of course here, on the saddle, watching the world disappear as a new dimension emerges. This is how you 'alive' and switch yourself on. Your bodymindspirit is a lamp, and it needs to be switched on before it can radiate its light. This is done by embodying yourself and eschewing the carry-cots that man has filled the world with. 80 minutes is all it takes to get that heart energised. And if you cannot afford eighty minutes out of one thousand four hundred and forty (24 hours) then you are in deep trouble, for it means that you get up in the morning but never actually wake up. And with this apparition of aliveness, your heart (and your soul) remains asleep.