Man doesn't grow anymore, he accumulates, gets larger, metastasizes and spreads. He doesn't grow because growing is dependent on going and if you do not go (as in use your own locomotive force to move you) then you cannot grow. Man's 'growth' is now in line with an economic growth that treats the eco- with such disdain that his 'growth' now follows the same pattern as the malignant cancer cell. Man's loss of space and contact with the soils. seas, and skies, has made him into a tumour, the tumour emerging from the tumult and the crowd that man's false economy has welcomed. Furthermore, man has abandoned his body to machines that do it for him whilst polluting his environment. This abandonment has led to the destruction of the human's route system to the point where he can longer hear the earth communicating with him. Man needs to get back into his own body and not the shell of a body that has been fixed onto him like armour, an armour that prevents man not just from hearing the earth but from feeling the earth and seeing her. And the best way to get back into your own body is to get back onto your own two feet, whether through cycling, walking, or other.
It's amazing the territory you can cover (home into) on your own two feet especially when you combine the bicycle and the train. Personally, I have a few short train routes that I use as catapult to get me and my metal hoss a little further out, or if I cycle down to the coast or up to Loch Lomond, a train that can heave my weary body back home. Everyone should know that 'bike plus train equals brain' and use this equation accordingly to home in on your territories and create a vital and revitalizing home range. This expansiveness will not only create 'routes' but it will create roots too. These are the roots and routes that will align your physical body with your circumstantial body, and the more the two align the more expansive you will feel as a mindful bodying entity.
We are all plants whether we recognize this or not. We all have root systems, the only difference being that an animal's root system is a little more difficult to see since the root is the 'route through the land itself'. Naturally, in amongst these roots (and routes) there will be a main taproute, a large central dominant route from which other roots will sprout laterally. This taproot is your main locomotive route. Roots are routes since all a root really is is locomotion manifest whilst delivering nutrition. A root in other words is a natural delivery system that delivers vital sustenance into you. This is what a cycle route is or a walking route, indeed, one might say that the Sustrans routes all over the country are exactly that: taproots that deliver vital nutrition to all those who conjoin with it. A country without these taproots is not a country but a quagmire. And just as the country is a quagmire without this 'health service', so too is the body a wheelie bin without auto-locomotion. One of my taproots takes me down to Bridge of Weir from Paisley Canal on the sustrans cycle path. I then veer off up and over the plateau (via Barnbeth, Auchensale, Law) and through a few miles of empty back lanes before descending down to the village of Kilbarchan and heading back on the sustrans path to Paisley Canal. It's a route of some 90-120 minutes depending on how many pauses I make to inhale the settings or if I make a tangent. But, really, like all routes that deliver this much nutrition (peace, no cars, full country settings, villages, flowers everywhere, animals, birds...), it's timeless, and it's this timelessness that invests you within a sort of ecstatic eternity that reveals the cyclist or walker of these here parts to be all things. Every plant should have a taproot, and if you don't then you're not a plant anymore receving sustenance and communiques from the Earth but some sort of parasite (car-driver) polluting her when you're not sucking the lifeblood (oil) out of her.
So, the moral of the story is: tend to the roots by attending to the route system. See yourself as 'plant' before 'man' or 'woman' and the bodymind will take care of itself.
