Jimmy the lizard is one of the brujo's allies. The brujo bows before Jimmy for he recognizes its inner god. This inner god is complete original alignment with the Earth and by extension everything else. This makes Jimmy god, and the brujo bows because of this.
The lizard after all is the wizard of living...
I love the weather in Glasgow because I have evolved with it. Look at the words 'Love' and then 'Evolve'. Evolution begins with 'Love'. It's obvious is it not? If you evolve naturally (is there any other kind?) with your environment then you are 'in love', since it was aboriginal evolution and not some industrial artifice that grew you in line with everything else. This 'being in love' is the state of the wild. By contrast, the state of the domesticated is a state of being out of love (which may explain our obsession with it) and why there's so much trouble in the world. At any rate, when you're in love you begin to notice things, little things that had previously passed you by in your industrialized state, that had because of their familiarity been taken for granted. Like the cabbage palm (cordyline australis), or the cordyline red, or the Spanish dagger (yucca gloriosa), plants that are familiar sights in Glasgow but which appear slightly out of place for their obvious connotations to warm and sunny climes. When you relieve yourself of a closetted life and begin to live outdoors you feel these plants in the flesh and begin to see them with fresh eyes, or indeed for the very first time. We are all plants whether we like to admit or not, living breathing organisms that are rooted deeply the soil. We all follow the great LAW that plants adhere to: Light, Air, Water. So, in a way, by checking these plants out, I am just visiting my long lost relatives and getting to know them again.
River-wading like hill-walking requires your strictest attention. The last time I did it was crossing the Calder Water coming down from Hill of Stake at Muirshiel Country Park. This was after a four hour hike through mostly spongy heather so the water was a refreshing end. Likewise, yesterday, coming back from Paisley Canal beside Bull Wood I noticed the river (the White Cart Water) was pretty low and so I crossed with bike to the Van Gogh fields opposite whereupon I found the little farm path (Scott Road) that takes you alongside the railway line to Crookston. It's a fine thing to have such pastoral scenes right beside one's home and to be able to unstandardize the body by moving through them. I have always opposed being told what to do and this means firstly 'avoiding the standard', which in turn means, off-road, cross-river, in-field, through-hill: the 'animal path' and 'the way that is wild'. The car is the devil, and its henchmen (the apparatus set up to accommodate the car) little devils. That means, in order to truly become human you must avoid it. That means avoiding roads as much as possible and getting back into the hills and rivers!
I watched a film (ok, so it was only a single scene) where a group of young men hike up to the top of a hill whereupon one of them pulls out a bong that he then fills with weed and smokes. And I'm thinking, who on Earth would destroy the natural high that you have just generated (through all that hard work) in getting to the top of that hill in the first place? You don't hike to the tops of hills to smoke weed. You hike to the tops of hills to smoke the hills!
Reading of Mount Baldy, the highest point in the San Gabriel Mountain range near Los Angeles, I thought of my own mount baldy and the freshly shaven head. Is this not the real mountain: the shaved head, the streamlined cone, the smooth aerodynamic cueball? At any rate, I came across this wonderful mountain in the book Wild LA which is similar in tone and theme to Richard Sutcliffe's Wildlife Around Glasgow or Susan Hothersall's equally excellent Archaeology Around Glasgow. It got me thinking of the movies that are set in and around Los Angeles County and how I have never heard or seen any reference to Mount Baldy which is quite amazing really seen as how close it is to downtown LA (about 45 miles).
Walking past fields with lambs, seated or playing next to their mothers, I can't help seeing them as bona fide 'children' Their resemblance to human babies (not just sonically when calling out for their mother) is uncanny. THe way thye look at you, their gentle frlocking, their general child-like being. This is what a 'child' is: that which emerges from the womb, from Old English cildhama (literally, child-home). How anyone can eat lamb is beyond me in the same way that eating another person's children is beyond me, even if they are slow-roasted and seasoned with a nice mint-sauce.
Nature provides. Part of this provision is vision itself, and insight. When you converse with Nature regularly enough and intimately enough she gifts you with this ability to see. Like when I inadvertently exported some fly larvae from an outdoor park via some bark chippings. The following spring they hatched around the base of my lemon tree where I had placed the bark chippings as mulch. As far as these tiny little flies were concerned this lemon tree was the centre of their world and my living room something of a solar system complete with large spherical sun. In spite of my leaving the window open they would not leave but remained around the place where they had emerged. Many died due to mishaps and my carelessness at 'tiny fly' level. Others died because they had been born into a world that could not sustain them, that they did not evolve with. Still, the remainers would not leave. This was their world after all. For me, the insights were manifold. How being born into a world no matter how defective is still your world. How suffering arises from being born into an artificial world that does not naturally sustain you and how this suffering throws you out of cosmic alignment. And how, even flies as tiny as these little guys, can see you, a large misshapen humanoid, as their mother, because you were the first face and form they saw after being born.
And lastly, how leaving your world (instead of creating the conditions that allow it to repair itself) is simply not an option.
