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.