Le Saut Dans Le Vide

Do you know yourself well enough to know what you can do and what you cannot? You do not know your own powers. You never investigated. Begin with yourself now.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That

'Goofball in the Braes'

The shaman is always performing a balancing act. This is the nature of his existence: balancing between the dreamworld and the real. It's a tricky thing to be sure, but the more you practise the more confident you become that you're on the right path, the only path. 

Here, this sunny and dry morning, I felt bouyed by the light, by the feel of spring underneath, and so I myself decided to spring. My younger brother had mentioned Yves Klein the other day in reference to his all blue 'Blue' painting and so his name (and antics) were in my mind.

But that wasn't all. As I was springing from this microcosmic mountain, my other younger brother was doing his own 'springing' as in tumbling down Ben Nevis wrapped in an avalanche. He survived thanks to another team of climbers hearing his calls and for the fact that the avalanche was not that big. Nevertheless, he still suffered a broken leg and had to be airlifted off by Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team.

'Le Saut Dans Le Vide' indeed.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-51656381

Monday Morning in the High Sierra

So you can keep your Alps. Give me the timeless sweep of a land that can encompass boggy moor, clinging heather, problematical rivers and ancient pathways. Those who comlain about British terrain, like those who complain about British weather, suffer from a lack of imagination.

Ralph Storer, The Joy of Hillwalking

This morning in the 'High Sierra'.... 10 minutes on the bicycle to Partick from my gaff in Cessnock. Another 20 minutes on the train from Partick to Kilpatrick. And then another, say, half hour on the bike and on foot up the Loch Humphrey path and into the Hanging Wood, and you're there.... the High Sierra, or equally the Alps, or equally Heaven...

Two Hours of Sunshine

I almost never went out this morning. In fact, I didn't. It was 12.07pm before I entered the world. It was freezing when I got up and I made the colossal error of getting comfortable in my kitchen.
The problem we have today with our apartness and apartments is that they make it too easy - too diseasey - not to go out. We have all the mod cons, the external heating and clothes and ovens, that mean we don't have to warm ourselves up by engaging our own engines. But perhaps worst of all, we have our mental mod cons of reasoning and justifying.

It's all horseshit though, just like the two big steaming piles I passed this early afternoon up in the bucolic surrounds of rural Renfrewshire. All this comfort and ease detracts from the path, and from the learning, as the etymology of the word 'detract' suggests (de + tract, away from the path, away from learning). The path and the learning being your live wild aliveness, and your complete existential awareness-awakeness. A mere hour after leaving my apartment I was in the zone of silence, space, and solitude. I was in the light, and breathing as Nature had intended we curious creatures should breathe. Modern life, by contrast, with its banality of anti-Nature, is just a big crack pipe that we smoke on because our governments tell us to do so, and we have little imagination left. But that two hours of sunshine, up there on the plateau of the raven, cycling through villages and past frozen golden fields, cannot be measured, for it is, in allowing yourself to align with Nature - locomotion, space, the desolate hills, the birds! - immense and thus immeasurable. This is the nature of the self, and those two measly hours re-mind us of this.


 

1917: No Wonder Your World is Fucked

If we do not enact an ecological critique of the technologies and industries of the spirit, if we do not show that the unlimited exploitation of spirits as markets leads to a ruin comparable to that which the Soviet Union and the great capitalist countries have been able to create by exploiting territories or natural resources without any care to preserve their habitability to come - the future - then we move ineluctably toward a global social explosion, that is, toward absolute war.

Bernard Stiegler, Technics & Time

War. That is the current state of play in the world. War of comfort and consumption, war of waste, war of the frivolous and the trivial, war of the non-essential. This of course is the Great War: the battle for the soul. But we are losing, because we are fighting the unseen 'enemy' of our Self without knowing it is our Self.

Take the film 1917 for example. It's up for eleven Oscars, has had more hype than the launch of a new smartphone, and is your typical pyrotechnics, CGI, and gimmicky shock-fest. War has never been so exciting, and yet... At any rate, when they were making it, they came up here to Govan, just beside my humble little cave by the river. They filmed a scene at the dilapidated Princes docks on the River Clyde. I remember seeing the looming yellow cranes from Partick on the other side of the river (presumably to hold up some green screens to blot Glasgow out) and thinking that there was some grand palace being constructed. When I got closer, the whole area, which had already been fenced off by the council some years previously, had had black lining put up against the fence to prevent anyone from seeing what was going on. I, however, with my rat-like sensibilities and local knowledge, managed to slip by the security detail (staring into phones), and see the actual palaver required to make this one, short (three minutes), and relatively uneventful scene. I counted 19 HGVs, 5 cranes, several hundred people (crew, actors, extras, caterers, flunkies, security, drivers et al.), countless shiny SUVs, and just a general mess of carbon and pollution. I wondered how far they had travelled, how much carbon they had released into the air thus far, and how they did all this for a scene that, after I had seen it, was convinced I could have shot on my small digital camera for less than a fiver and with none of the pollution.

And I thought, no wonder your world is fucked. If only you could see what I see...