A Raven's Eye View

When was the last time a crow said hello to you...?

In many land mythologies, the raven is the trickster, the playful winged one who sweeps and swings across the sky, seeing everything...

I recall noticing my first raven, thanks in part to my ornithologist friend who pointed it out to me, above the Gogo water behind Largs. I must've been in my mid thirties at the time, about the same time I noticed my first Jackdaw in Kilwinning (next to the tombstone of Robert Service's parents). To be sure, I was a late bloomer in terms of recognizing the larger family I belonged to. We had no education at school (St. Aloysius, Glasgow) that took us into Nature, that forced us to re-cognize where we actually were in terms of our 'anima' and 'anam'. Teilhard de Chardin would've been appalled at how the Jesuits left out the hills and the shorelines, the woods and the meadows, as part of our overall education. You could even see the Campsie Fells from where we were on Garnethill, indeed from some of the classroom windows on the appropriately named Hill Street. And yet, not once were they pointed out to me as a possible source of 'learning' or 'seeing', or 'development'.

I wonder what John Ogilvie would've thought of that, or Ignatius Loyola whose spiritual exercises regularly involved, like so many holy men, the whole context instead of just a fragment.

The words 'Mind' and 'Soul' indeed never really meant anything to the young man that I was other than some obscure definition that no-one could ever explain very well. It was only when I began to immerse myself in Nature, in the act of being born again and again and again..., that I realised what Mind and Soul actually were: that is, the epi-phenomena that arise when all is as it is. Nevertheless, what is can be an aberration of what Nature 'intended', and this is how it is with modernity to the point where Mind and Soul are contaminated. The goal then is to uncontaminate, to strengthen the immune system by way of our relationship with Nature to the point where the contaminants cannot affect you. 

The ravens know this, and act accordingly. Nature knows this, and simply is. Man on the other hand has been so blindsided by the gloss and glitter, and the song and dance of his own small segregated self, that he is completely in the dark, which explains why he can do and say some of the things that he does. If man were not in the dark, if he stood in the light till he became it, then the world would be a very different place. Poets would be presidents, and bicycles would be cars. And ravens and jackdaws would be considered part of our extended family like our cousins and uncles. 

Soon, Mind would return to us, as would Soul, and we would, through our new animated and awake view, realize where we were...

Magpie & Moon

Sounds like a twee little shop selling arts and crafts, and maybe it is, somewhere...

But up here, at the top of the hill (Saucelhill behind Paisley Canal), it's the real thing!

[Magpie & Moon, and Contrail just didn't have the same ring to it]

Friday, 26th January, 2018, 14h50

The All-Founting Knowledge of Spout: The Melting of the Moors and Braes

This afternoon on Radio 3, there was a short program on Celtic Connections featuring a certain Kate Morrison. In it she spoke of the Scots tongue and the Nature that inflected it. She talked of larks and birch trees, hills and snow, burns and streams. And she finished quite succinctly by saying:

If everyone had and intimate familiarity with place everything would be better...

It is this intimacy - this familiarity that encompasses 'Family' in its fullest biodiverse sense - that I have honed over the years. I often think of it as a 'relationship' that precedes and enables all other relationships. To live on the top floor of a building and not pay any attention to its subsiding foundations is just plain stupid.

Everest Schmeverest

Who needs Everest when you've got a hill? Everest is simply an ego-mountain for nutters that have never come to terms with their non-ego-selves and with the local. It is also something of a great big dustbin now thanks to all those small-minded egos who can't control their own chest-puffing juvenility. It's never about quantity anyway, the hills around Glasgow have taught me as much. It's the quality of the journey that counts. And here, with Glasgow's gentle hills, we have quality in abundance. The sooner we all start tapping into the local via our own locomotive and locating forces the sooner we will realise that 'Everest' is a state of mind. It is to this end that I can say that I have climbed the highest mountain in the world (indeed, I am still ascending), which is really your self.

Approaching Everest from Garscadden.

The lovely village of Old Kilpatrick.

 From the ridge path looking back to the city.

Glorious Gilsochill

Even the most grim-looking of places can look seductive with a light covering of snow. It's the white, the purity, the untaintedness...

Here, on the platform at Gilsochill station, I had twenty whole minutes to tune in to the beauty... to align myself with the unworlded, and the unmanned...

I've always maintained that 'waiting is waking' and that to destroy your waiting by allowing your attention to be sidelined by some narcissistic, awareness-destroying technology (gazing into a phone) is to effectively dismantle your own soul, 'soul' being none other than the clarity of mind that allows you to re-cognize your embeddedness and reciprocity within the whole of  Nature.

 

I was the only human for about nineteen minutes, until a late arrival appeared on the platform. No sooner was the bag put down than his hand was delving for that infernal dummy, the smartphone. It was as if he couldn't wait, in the same way that a junky can't wait to get his next fix. And all the while he's being redirected into this screen (redirected Being), he missed the magpies, the snow foxes, the coal tits, that deafening silence, the subtly shifting light, that damp smell of the frozen air... in short, everything! Now, no longer an immense being whose very existence has emerged out of mutually engendering processes, we have a self-contained zombie whose very humanity has been decanted into a device not much bigger than a hand. The result is annihilation, and alienation. And a sense of self that is so small and vinegarry, that nothing can be seen except one's own small segregated (sur)face. 

One of the greatest dangers facing our society today is the extinction of space-times reserved for contemplation. No longer do people gaze wistfully out of a train carriage window at the passing hills and river, just as they no longer they acknowledge each other along the way... they just stare catatonically into this stupefying little phone. The loss here is a vital one, that of a critical and broad-cast thinking engendered by a contemplative and spacious attitude towards seeing. Without this inter-web of thinking and self-observation (where the self is something altogether different than what society has defined it as), the human becomes the post-human, half-dead if not all-dead, and posthumously alive.

Inside the Muffle

 The Kilpatrick Hills can usually be seen from here in the distance...

To be sure, the variety of weather available to the average west-coast denizen of Scotland is marvellous. I have lived in countries where there are only two distinctions in their weather: hot and cold. These are not really places to live and breathe, but to pass through, and be glad that you had. Yet, modernity has tempered our weather with monstrous things like air conditioners and radiators, and so what was meant to be passed through, at a brisk pace, is now settled and built upon.

At any rate, having lived (settled for a limited period) in some of these places, I can recognize without too much difficulty the beauty of the rain, the cleansing freshness of an icy breeze, the magic of a spontaneous shower, in short, the diversity of weather (a sort of radical bio-diversity that engenders all other diversities) that Scotland is. 

I can recall not that long ago being put off by the rain or a dull gloomy sky. Now, however, having shook off my prejudices, I am more open to the grey than to a cloudless sky. There's something special about being out on a dull gloomy almost dark January day. For a start, there's no-one about (the wind and the rain keep the fools away), except the birds. Then there is the atmosphere, of being almost inside a cloud, like today, when the clouds were so low as to envelop anyone venturing up a hill. One becomes bio-enveloped: sealed inside a larger entity which effectively enabled your birth. Now, it's the grey and not the light that enlightens...

The misty ridge of Boglairoch...

Nebulous, these hills become magical when the mist descends upon them. Death walks alongside you. Only then can you announce your complete aliveness.

Greenside Reservoir.... partially frozen over. If I ever decide to make that horror film, at least I know where that opening shot is coming from.

The Ambient Array

I, radicle, radiate...


The hills around Glasgow radiate. They eke into us without us knowing. They are a natural array of energy which infiltrates us subtly.

 

Pythagorean

I discovered today that I am a pythagorean. Pythagoras was known for his doctrines of the transmigration of souls and the music of the spheres, but what interested me was discovering that he used to go in for solitary hill-walking (not so much cycling), and a frugal way of living (possibly vegetarian). His walking was almost always done in the mornings, as Pythagoras thought it inadvisable to converse with anyone until he had gained inner serenity. He was a man who was aware of the danger of crowds, and of the mass hysteria that could be mustered up within one. In today's world, Pythagoras would be appalled at the 'crowding' of everything, from physical populations to social media, and he would be even more appalled at the fact that solitary walking (without the aid of pacifiers and placators) has almost been made extinct. No longer do people walk the hills with a view to becoming a better human being, but to show off their new clobber, and to cleanse their conscience for all that nonsense they eat. As far as this is concerned, modern hill-walking is as self-absorbed as staring into your phone. But not with Pythagoras. Here was a man who knew the far-ranging benefits of 'being on the move', and of igniting the bodymind through developing an intimate relationship with the land and Nature. Pythagoras believed that Nature liberated the body from the soul and allowed thereof a compassionate understanding of all things. This state of being 'dead in reality' is also taken up by Zen Buddhists who talk of being dead whilst still being alive: 'nirvana with a remainder' as they call it. It happens when you go into wild spaces devoid of noise and distortion. This, Pythagoras knew, that solitary hill-walking was a dialectic of becoming dead in order to become alive. Without this killing of the ego every morning, Pythagoras knew there was little chance of Reality ever emerging, and the masquerade would simply continue. 

The mask had to be torn off every morning, as it appeared to grow again every night as he slept.

And so, one can do a lot worse than follow a Pythagorean regimen: frugal, flowing, and ultimately fruitful. The trainer of souls they called him, and not without good reason.

The Morning Shower

The giant pine tree grows from a tiny sprout. The journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath your feet.  

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

The morning shower used to be a regular event until I realised that the best way to wake up was not to stand under a warm-hot shower but to get out into the morning rain. This was the natural shower, and Glasgow and its oceanic climate, I soon found out, was blessed with these.

The idea was to re-naturalize the body, and get it away from the diverted-perverted body which had been weaned on artifice and distortion, and 'the city'. Modern society is nothing but a per-version of natural society, and a diverting of the human animal from the natural ways of getting things done. Whether its cars or power showers, fashion or education, the society we have made for ourselves is not natural, but rather a perversion of it, marked by distortion, pollution, desecration, and measurement. And it all begins, as the old saying goes, with a single step. In the wrong direction.

It's all well and good for a pine tree. It cannot subvert its own nature to the extent that man can. The crown of the pine tree cannot grow downwards into the darkness. Man can.

I much prefer the saying that Gurdjieff had, that it takes much dedication (surrounded by such perversion) to become a tree. Of all the acorns shed by the oak, maybe only one becomes a strong oak tree. The others are food and fodder for other creatures. Thus, 'It takes great strength to become a tree'.

At any rate, that's the goal, to become 'tree': to radicalize the body and become rooted and great (in the sense that one's fruits of one's bodymind matrix [and not the bodymind itself] are shared with others. The purpose of life, Picasso used to say, was to find your gift; the meaning of life, to give it away.

The fortuity of beauty on the platform at Clydebank. You cannot have a rainbow without a little rain.

Oh the weather! Almost biblical.

Becoming tree... Most people push a boulder up a hill... I push a bicycle.

Weatherings

Typically, 'weathering' is the breaking down of soil, rock and minerals as well as other materials (including those 'materials' that have been artificially imposed upon you), by way of contact with the Earth's atmosphere, waters, and biological organisms. This is the generally accepted (physical) definition. Yet, there is also a metaphysical element at play here which breaks down and relieves the organism of excess, and reveals it to be at one with its environment of which the weather is a constituent part. It is this metaphysic of the weather, its capacity to pare down and bare away, and reveal (the organism as the environment), that interests me here.

It has always struck me as blindingly obvious that in Nature, creatures are not fat unless that fat is a necessary pre-condition for survival. In human society, fat as obesity (and unnatural corpulence) has appeared through a lack of contact with Nature and our absence of weathering. More and more we appear to block ourselves off from our environment, whether by cars and their screens + speed, or by way of weather-proof clothing and other means. One of my pet-hates (apart from the motor-car and the people who espouse its evil necessity) are people with umbrellas. I find the whole umbrella thing entirely ego-lit and stupid, just another instance of how man cannot hear Nature even if he tried. To see a grown man holding an umbrella the size of a satellite dish just so he can protect his daft little head from a few raindrops of aqua vita, is yet another indictment on the anti-Nature / anti-contemplative society we have created for ourselves.

It's not that people cannot feel the weather, (we have not de-evolved to that level yet) they have just been weaned like spoiled children on a system of comfort, clothing, and cage-ism. To the point where they are no longer en-joyed by the rain, or the wind, or the hail, or the cold. Our system of cages (the reality of modern society) has created weather-racists of us all. Certain  'species' of rain and sun are favored over others; storms and high winds are considered evil for the destruction they cause. To be sure, certain creatures are more amenable to certain weather conditions, but it's really all a matter of open-ness and reception, and relieving yourself of the invisible cage around you, emphatically, by 'dancing with the weather' and not staring at it from behind a veil. That's not say that one should stride about like an emperor in his new clothes, but, rather, to re-enter into the weather at all occasions of its marvellous variety...and to dispose of the umbrellic accoutrements  that close us off from it (whilst simultaneously advertising some monstrous retailer).

The weather wakens... it exfoliates the nonsense that has been layered upon us by an overly sheltered society. The umbrella is a symbol of that nonsense, as is most clothing that seeks to circumvent the weather and dispel it altogether. The following sketches and verses are insights gained from my intercoursing with my better half, the weather.

In these orgasmic moments of oneness, sitting refreshed on the top of a hill, with the oxygenation of the total body, one approaches this state of awakeness. Tempered by the weather, one becomes like the hill one is walking through:  craggy and cantankerous in places, wild and windswept, but overall alive.