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.