The Hanging Wood

The old growth woodland here is possibly the only piece of unadulterated nature we have left in the greater Glasgow area. Not out of love I might add, but out of the fact that it clings to a cliff. Though its arboration is significantly larger, the 'hanging wood' as I have come to know it, merits two green trees on the current OS Landranger map of Glasgow.

Here, in the pre 2012 OS maps, we have two four trees tenuously linked along the braes.

So you can imagine my surprise when in the most recent map they joined it all up with eleven great big trees! (Much more like the real thing in fact).


The old growth forest here is not entirely unlike our own brains. Indeed, the word cortex comes from the Latin meaning bark. If you look up, more so in winter when the deciduous trees are largely bare, to the canopy of entangled branches, you might as well be looking at the internal structure of the brain. Look beneath into the earth and you will see the same: a vast neural network of interconnecting root systems that virtually cover the whole earth.






















This is the brain, the great earth brain, full of air and rain and earth. It's 'thinking' is not so much thinking as not thinking, a state of cool meditation, and herbal infusion.

Man has lost this treehood, this ability to be still and unworlded, to tap in to the bedrock, the core, to open his self up to the all. The world exists only for man. It does not exist for trees. There is a reason the Buddha sat beneath a tree.


























The world is a fabrication, made by men for men. It is an age, an epoch, an event, that will one day come to an end when man himself comes to an end. The world is a cordon around the cosmos. It prevents us from seeing. It prevents us from being cosmic.

The earth on the other hand is the natural result of treehood, and planthood, of a natural clan that has a pact with the land which does not impinge upon it. Trees recognize the reciprocity of earth. The man-world on the other hand recognizes no such mutuality, and instead focuses upon one-sidedness, mono-directional linearity, and logic. Where Man has lost his balance, trees remain deeply anchored even when they are toppled by strong winds.

One might even conclude that the earth is a tree whose roots and photosynthetic apparatus are intimately connected with the human's own roots. One might then say that 'deforestation' is not simply about removing trees from the earth, but about dismantling and dismembering the human.

This dismembering leads to confusion and instability. Which leads to conflict, and crisis.

And crisis paralyses being.

And since 'being determines consciousness' we can see that man's consciousness is also in a state of paralysis

The human meanwhile has become a scarecrow, scaring off all the Earth's creatures because of his heavy-handedness, and his lack of lightness. Even the trees are scared of man, though they try hard not to show it.


























There is also an old Greek saying that says that a culture grows great when men plant trees under whose shade they know they shall never sit. Well, the converse is also true: that a culture grows decadent when a society no longer knows what a tree is.

I've had numerous discussions with the forestry commission about this point alone, since they are the people who have planted hundreds (if not thousands) of non-native trees on these braes in the last two years with zero success. They appear to know nothing of what a tree (let alone a forest) actually is. In their recent bizarre attempts to cover the hills and braes in plantation they have littered the landscape with dead trees and potholes which present an ongoing problem for walkers (as do the now omnipresent ten foot deer fences with no stiles), not to mention the desolate aspect that all these dead saplings have conferred upon the land. It's like a mass grave, arguably worse than the horrific desolation that is left behind when a plantation is finally harvested.

Their answer to my queries has always been the same churlish response: that the land belongs to them, and they will do what they like with it. Unsurprising really, since Scotland has had a terrible history regarding deforestation, and the de-nuding of its hills and glens. Yet, if our consciousness is kept in permanent state of torpor by the buzzwords of banality (convention, comfort, ease, and convenience), we will never realize what a tree actually is.

And by ‘tree’ I don’t simply mean an external description or definition, blank and alone, as perhaps you might find in a dictionary, but a more rounded, and fuller, ‘in-finition’, where the tree becomes everything that sustains and nourishes it. This is the insight that can be gained from sitting quietly with trees: that somehow within the tree you will find your self. And there is no better place to contemplate this than up here, hanging onto the side of a hill, overlooking the strath.