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!
Smoking the Hills
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!
Mount Baldy
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).
Eating Children
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.
Earth's Insights
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.
Selective Deafness
I find it extraordinary that people can seal their major sense up and not think that they're doing anything wrong. The ears more than the eyes are your primary sense organ. It's the ears that hone in first to whatever's going on and then tell the eyes where to look. As far as this is concerned, to seal those ears up behind a medley of 'music' is tantamount to a sort of suicide. In the wild, to be deaf is to be dead. Yet, we have become so docile because we have been so domesticated (or is that 'dominated') by comfort, ease, and convenience, that people rarely think about it. And of course, when you criticize them for being childish (which is what human society is now) they look at you as if you have two heads. I sympathize with people who tell me there is nothing worth listening to in a city where cars have more priority than people. But there is, even if it is only your heart beating or the blood pulsing through your veins. There is always something to hear even in the most industrialized landscape. Indeed, since the industrialized landscape produces industrialized beings, you need to know where these beings are, since they may indeed be preying upon you. To seal yourself up behind music when you're out and about, music that you can listen to in the comfort of your own home, is simply stupid when it isn't downright obstinate. Beethoven would be appalled at this type of selective deafness.
