On the Way to Contemplation Rock

I have uncovered a great many perches over the past ten years of walking and cycling the strath...

Contemplation Rock, in the Kilpatrick Hills, is just one of these....

The Ecology of a Glasgow Tenement

I first became aware of the biodiversity of a building when I lived in Warsaw, on the top floor of a four storey social housing block. It was a marvellous little apartment looking onto a wonderful 'square' of grass, replete with huge Elm tree and various shrubs. The life that I encountered in and around that flat was often more non-human than human such was the proliferation of green. All manner of birds made the square their home, and nested in the strangest of places, including air vents (blue tits), the eaves (sparrows) and the trees themselves (magpies, woodpeckers et al.). When I returned to Glasgow, I was immediately disappointed with the lack of biodiversity in my courtyard. I had found a little flat in Cessnock, top floor social housing again, that looked onto a slightly smaller square of green. Granted, the courtyard had just been renovated from a wash of middens and concrete, and the council had planted birch trees (they grow quickly) and hedgerows. Soon, within a few years, the birds started coming. Even a pair of seagulls took to the roof and made it their home for 6 months of the year. Blackbirds and sparrows (the most recent visitors) regularly dive in to the courtyard for a butchers, checking out the lawns and the hedges for titbits. Wood pigeons and as well as the more common pigeon regularly come in too, and generally speaking, the neighbours too, especially those who live on the ground floor have made a real effort to welcome in our non-human brethren by planting shrubs and plants that can offer solace and food to these winged visitors.

In terms of 'architecture', space is vital. Not just for humans (let's not forget the dialectic of being human: that you are only human in contact and conviviality with what is not human), but for birds and other animals. Indeed, the French architect Corbusier noted that green space was as vital to the building as the bricks themselves. Nevertheless, you could be forgiven for thinking the opposite when wandering around some of Glasgow's housing schemes ('Spot the Tree' is a game I play), or any city for that matter.

What struck me about Warsaw and Varsovians was immediate: that they had this space, this vital space, in place. Courtyards were overflowing with trees and grass, shrubs and all manner of plantlife. Naturally, insects too, butterflies and birds abounded. Trees had buckets tied around them filled with leftover bread urging locals to please feed the birds (Warsaw winters were horrendously cold). Strings of fat hung from branches, and communal squares (which were actually gardens) had all manner of bird feeders and water baths. The birds loved it, and they showed their love by roosting in the architecture.

After three years living in one of these social housing 'squares', though my knowledge of the Polish language was pretty lamentable overall, I found myself speaking 'Crow' (Warsaw is a corvid crossroads like no other), 'Kafka' (the Polish word for Jackdaw), and 'Woodpecker' (an astonishing variety of woodpeckers even within the city limits) to a pretty proficient standard. I had always thought of language as a uniquely human faculty, but of course I was young and stupid and so 'up my own arse' in terms of 'human superiority' that I could not see very far beyond my own broken nose. I now talk to birds as well as humans, and sometimes they talk back.

In his wonderful book The Ecology of a Summer House, the American naturalist Vincent Dethier makes a note of the plant and animal life that make of his Maine summer house their home during the year. It is a fascinating account of a biodiverse home that has been recognized as such. I am all too aware of people who when they see a spider crawling across their living room carpet make a mad dash for the newspaper. Yet, it is a blessing to have such creatures in your home (unless you live in Australia!). Think about it. They have chosen your home to settle into. When I lived in Jizan in Saudi Arabia we had gekkos coming into our bungalows, and wild arabian dwarf bees nesting in our football goal posts. I was amazed at the number of so-called intelligent people whose immediate reaction was one of fear or murder. The unknown scared them, these big galoots. Their ignorance of the animal world simply revealed an ignorance of their very own selves. I mean, how can you be scared of a bee? Ok, a few thousand bees is a different matter, but they're not concerned with you unless of course you disturb them. The same goes with most animals and insects that come into your home. They know you're there. The last thing they're going to do is jeopordize their tenancy!

Ever since I moved into my flat here seven years ago, I have not killed a single fly. Perhaps, this is because my knowledge of flies (and myself) is a little bit wider than what it used to be. In fact, Dethier himself wrote a book called To Know a Fly. The problem we have here in the west is that we think we have better things to do than to get to know a fly. Yet, getting to know a fly is possibly one of the most amazing things you can do. It gives you insight, knowing a fly. It gives you wings learning that a fly and you are not so far apart.

So, next time, you're ready to squash a poor insect for nothing more than finding your home a pretty good environment to co-habit, or in the case of flies or wasps, getting lost behind those diabolical panes of nothingness (how frustrating must that be?), spare a thought for biodiversity, for all life-forms (ugly and beautiful); imagine how you would feel stuck in a glass box that you can't get out of, headbutting nothing until your brains fall out. Our winged brethren, whether a wasp or a bird, share with us and all animals the horror of being trapped. But you have the power to liberate....

to liberate your Self, through the freeing of a fly...

Think about it..

How Glas is My Strath!

It rarely matters when you are.... most eras in the history of civilization are marked by toil and recovery, construction-destruction, and suffering. I see it here, in my own city of Glasgow, people misunderstanding the nature of living. Indeed, like the Welsh mining town in the 1941 film How Green Was My Valley, there is a lot of ill-health even in today's so-called progressive economy. We may have done away with the coal pits and the chimney sweeps but we have replaced them with call centres and deliveroo. This is the nature of man - deception: deceiving himself, deceiving others. Call centres, in their boxing in and aggressive selling, are simply modern day collieries. And the people who work in them, modern day miners.

And yet, the city of Glasgow is not its call centres, nor its shopping malls. People may make Glasgow as the slogan goes (more selling), but the hills made the people, and without the rivers and streams, there would be no Glas chu (Glasgow's original name, from the Gaelic meaning grey-green hollow). And yet, how many of Glasgow's youth know of its peripheral hills, know of the 'valley aspect', know of its sources and springs? Not many, from what I can gather in my pastoral excursions. I rarely encounter another person when I'm out and about, nevermind young people. It would appear that people are simply unaware of the health benefits of hills and wide open spaces, of the natural setting that can lead to one's awakening from the city's slumber, of hill-walking, or strath-cycling. Most, and this reveals the hamster-like nature of what man has been fashioned into, prefer a treadmill in a noisy enclosed gym. But man is more than just his body. One might say that the human's body is indefinable, since it is an open-flowing system that is intimately entwined with the elements and the earth at large.

Walking the hills or cycling the strath is a case then of getting to know yourself, getting to know again the 'body' that you were estranged from soon after birth, when the brainwashing and the conditioning began. In terms of its periphery of semi-wild spaces - the Campsie Fells, the Kilpatrick Hills, the Renfrewshire Moors and the lumps and bumps of Inverclyde - I have lived and breathed in no finer city (with perhaps the exception of Warsaw in Poland whose lack of hills is more than made up for by its forests). And I have been about - living in around 15 cities worldwide over the past two decades since the age of 25.

Indeed, a city that does not have a halo of hills (or forest) surrounding it (that can sanitize and canonize), or green fingers that penetrate and ventilate (allowing ease of access/escape), is not a city but a symptom of the great existential-ecological disease that the modern day coagulated city seems predicated upon. I mean, look at cities like London or Paris or New York for instance - they're so big and noisy that to grow up in them is to positively welcome mental and bodily illness. And that's to say nothing of the Chinese cities like Xian, or Beijing, whose pollution levels are simply a crime against humanity and all of Nature.

When I lived in Warsaw (for 3 years) I was immediately aware of her green 'fingers' which were virtual corridors of green-ness coming from the exurban countryside that almost penetrated the city's centre. I was also aware that in spite of Warsaw's fairly strict policy of maintaining these green corridors there was always the possibility of corruption: spaces being developed when they should be left alone. Indeed, it's a constant battle against the developers who see the city (as most are apt to do) as a big dollar sign waiting to be cashed in. One's 'body' is being contantly violated by the rapaciousness of developers and short-sighted, small-minded, capitalists. 

Glasgow is fortunate in that it has seen a great number of its citizens give back to the city in terms of green-ness. Maxwell, Burrell, Elder et al. have all donated large spaces to be left alone. Imagine if didn't have people who saw the existential benefits from the leaving alone of nature? 

Becoming Hill

'It isn't what you know in your head but what you've become that matters most...'

Belden Lane, Backpacking with the Saints

Words and language have always fascinated me. Ever since I can remember I've always wanted to get to the bare roots of language, pare it all down and see/feel its essence. In a way, to paraphrase a fellow teacher who remarked insightfully one afternoon that 'teaching, sometimes, just gets in the way', language too can be a big red herring.

Man has tendency to over-complicate things, a tendency to show off (like a rooster shows off), and to over-use language to get his point across. Though I might not conform to a lexicon of just three words (as in Robert Lepage's oneiric film Possible Worlds), I am of the opinion that we don't need that many in order to 'essentialize ourselves'. Words just get in the way.

At any rate, tapping in to words, following their roots down to the source (or as near as one can get), is a fascinating activity. Words emerged from the land after all. And from our interaction with it. Language was natural back then, salted with seaweed, and flavored with rain. Now, so much artifice gets in the way that some words need to be positively and absolutely strip-searched in order to reveal their essence. Some words, such is the backwardness of modern man, have come to mean the opposite of what they were intended (look no further than, idiot, individual, demon, human etc..).

Other words are so transparent and simple that often we just use them without really knowing what we are saying. In other words, the over-use leads to ab-use, and when we abuse language we might as well abuse the land and ourselves with it. (Which of course we do).

The word here I want to highlight is the word Belden uses in the epigram that opens this post. The word 'become'. Now we all know the word 'come' which derives from the same Proto-Indo-European root as the word 'go'. It's simple enough. But stick a little prefix in front of it, in this case be- and we have a slight shift in meaning.  To come to something is one thing, to become this something is quite another. When I go into the hills, I come to the hills, and in so doing become them. This sounds rather freaky I admit, for I do not look like a hill. I am still very much in the shape of a humanoid. Yet, I am also mind as well as body, and though my body may still appear to be that of a human, my mind is very much in the shape of a hill.

In other words, the mind is shaped by the body's workings. If the body spends its time sitting at a desk performing duties that merely serve to put money in his pocket and little else, this will manifest itself in the mind. The mind will become boxed in, alienated, and calculative. If the body, however, spends its time exerting itself, spending its being in the rarefied air of the hills, listening to nature by way of our solitude and spaciousness, then the mind will become likewise.

And it's all in this little word be-come (I prefer it with a hyphen for its upsets the usual form to the point where we do a double-take). To become a saint one must go to saintliness. But what is saintliness?

It is no coincidence that the word sanity and saint look alike. Sanctitude is sanity. Sanity of course is Health with a capital H; in another word, wholeness. And of course wholeness is holiness. So, a saint is a Healthy entity, one which is systemically bound in to everyone else,whether it be animal, vegetable or mineral. One who is open to the earth, who recognises his humus composition and his roots... that go way down. That bind him back into the great matrix thatg he so eagerly wants to leave behind. This is the nature of religion, from the Lstin re+ligio meaning to restrain or to bind back.

A saint is someone who uses his own locomotive force in order to 'arrive'. Who restrains his self from being carried. Indeed, one might say that a saint is an 'arriver', one who arrives at places by virtue of this locomotive force and of a bodymind negotiating the land and the elements that gave rise to him.

It is an active participation in the Earth's own flows. In the modern era where cars are a ubiquitous form of 'travel', we have been blindsided once again by language and those who ab-use it. Car, let's be honest, is short for 'carry'. And yet, there are few car 'drivers' who would admit to being carried, who would, through the ab-use of language, probably say that driving is an active event. And in a way, it is. But the backbone of it is undeniably passive. One has abandoned one's own locomotive force (and thus any possibility of arriving, and of place). Locations become non-places as a result, or packaged spaces, there but for the good of you. Roads themselves, especially motorways, display an unnatural form of straightness geared for speed. Runways where man does not run.One has given up one's active moving, and yet I know of no other animal (that hasn't been tamed, imprisoned, injured, or dead) that will allow itself to be carried. Man, one could conclude, is the only animal that has give up life. Maybe this is why he is fascinated with death so much.

At any rate, I'm careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I do realise that the car can be a very handy device. Nevertheless, like a powerful drug, cars need to be kept in check. But we are addicted to being carried. Man has been made into a big junky baby who is pushed around in a big pram. And yet he cannot see this.

Take my word for it. Be-come the hills. You don't know how lucky you are if you live in Glasgow to have hills, gentle hills, on all sides. There is remoteness, space to listen, space to see. Space enough to be-come your Self.

 

Books in the Braes

I'd always intuited from a very early age that the reading of a book and the garnering of its fruits relied on some part on the where of its reading. Indeed, some books positively cry out to be read outwith the domesticated apparatus of civilization. Or 'read' in such a way that it does not send you to sleep, or propogate you back into the slumber that you sought to emerge from.

Books, much like anything, can be of two sorts - the sort that cleaves your head open and draws air into that brain, or the sort that sends you back to sleep within the soporific cliched existence of the pusillanimous and posthumous. Kafka said as much when he remarked that if your book is not of the latter species then it is not a book, but something to wipe your bum with. Sadly, in today's all too soporific society, where single-linear-mindedness triumphs, there is much toilet paper to go around.

Recently, whilst reading Belden Lane's Backpacking with the Saints, I was over the moon to read the following:

Reading a potentially dangerous book in a landscape perceived to be dangerous can be doubly hazardous. The place heightens the vulnerability occasioned by the text. Challenging books lose their bite when they're read comfortably at home in a favorite armchair. Their riskiness increases, however, when read by firelight in a forest glade, ten miles from the nearest road.

Here, it's not so much reading in the gloaming, as meditations on the peaks and the sides of hills, an endeavor I began in earnest a few years ago having felt what Lane just iterated, that a book can elevate more than usual if read within the 'correct' context.

Most of my thinking deals with Nature and how we can return once more to a harmonious way of being in the world, so it stands to reason that most of the books I go through (and study, not so much read), are books of that ilk.

I am tremendously fortunate in having retained a special readership at my alma mater Glasgow University's Library which, though not an especially exciting building from the outside (12 floors straight up), has views over the valley like no other (situated as it is on the top of Gimorehill). I had recognized many moons ago that reading on Level 11 (Philosophy & Fine Art), with the gulls outside, and the horizons beckoning, was better than reading in the bath, 'better' in that something more came through the text than the actual text itself. 

I then realized that if I went into the hills (which I could see from the upper floors of the library), I could jump the train with the bicycle in tow, and have ten-twenty minutes of reading on the train before getting off. This would invariably instil a notion in my mind which would then take shape on my way into the hills. Invariably, by the time I got halfway to the top (we're only talking wee hills here, 200-500m, more attitude than altitude), that notion, ventilated by the cool quiet of the hillside would have manifested itself into something quite insightful. 

This is the mountain study.... collecting the white-gathered element.

The benefits I found with a taking a book into the hills didn't stop there however. I found that the author's mind was actually somehow present, as a sort of companion, but a companion that didn't talk, that didn't stop every five metres to examine the bog asphodel and sphagnum (my botanist pal is guilty of such staccato movement), that didn't need watering or feeding, that didn't get tired and start complaining, in short, a companion that was there without being there. To be sure, there are benefits to having a botanically-minded stravaiging companion, and all the rest, but sometimes, to understand anything you have to arrive through your own power of solitude.

David Levin's The Listening Self....

Karlfried Graf Durckheim's Absolute Living...

William Corlett & John Moore's The Islamic Space...

Hakuin's The Four Ways of Knowing...

Absolute Living!

I'll tell you what it's not for........ (to use the words of Ellen Ripley).......it's not for screwing each other over (and every other animal for that matter) for a goddamn percentage.

 Julius Evola's Meditations on the Peaks

The Dhammapada

 Franco Berardi's The Soul at Work

 Belden Lane's Landscapes of the Sacred...

 Betrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness...

Herbert Marcuse's Reason & Eros

Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment...

 Marcel Mauss' A General Theory of Magic...

 Belden Lane's Backpacking with the Saints....

 Evelyn Underhill's Essentials of Mysticism...

 Edward Carpenter's Civilization: Its Cause and Cure...

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

Franz Kafka