The Slow Flow of Glasgow: The 10,000 Perches

Remember yourself. George Ivanivitch Gurdjieff

Mind Yersel. Glasgow Variation

'The Sacred Waterhole' in the Kilpatrick Braes.

Perish the thought that the perch should be the sole podium of the bird... Every creature needs a perch, preferably several dozen, from where to compost the stuff of life and death, and perhaps even compose something fruitful (or vegetal) from it. A perch is essential for any creature who recognizes the land, the sea and the sky as actual limbs of his vibrant vital body.

I imagine that the latest rounds of ill health that have struck modern man - the 'mind diseases' - are a consequence (directly and indirectly) of our recent rapid removal from these lands, seas, and skies... from our own vital body.

'Memory' I have come to see outwith the narrow definitions that modern man has given it (episodic, semantic, annotational), and see 'it' more as a way of being with the world, as a way of re-connecting and re-constituting the great Body that has effectively been mutilated and cut up into little pieces.

This dismembering of the Great Body (and the Great Mystery) has caused us to lose touch not only with our selves but with each other and with every other creature-entity in the universe. The only way to get better is to re-member the Great Body, and the best way to do that is to go into Nature, sit atop your perch, and recollect that which has been, not lost, but invariably sold.

The Earth by Navarre Scott Momaday

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon
the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up
to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from
as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon
it.

He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at
every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon
it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest
motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and
all the colors of the dawn and dusk.

For we are held by more than the force of gravity to the earth.
It is the entity from which we are sprung, and that into which
we are dissolved in time. The blood of the whole human race
is invested in it. We are moored there, rooted as surely, as
deeply as are the ancient redwoods and bristlecones.