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.