This post escaped from my phone however I am glad it did. Love this image, the rust, the colour and texture of the ‘skin’.
Monthly Archives: June 2016
You Don’t NEED to do that!
Hold still….oh well, never mind.
Mable, swim THIS way…
MABLE! Cute enough for now. I guess.
On the way up to Loughriff Fell, there is a ‘pond’. Where Mable my walking companion of this week took a long dip. Her name has been invoked very many times over the past days. But the one that has made us laugh the most is Mable! You don’t need to do that now!
This post is for a lovely black cat of my acquaintance who was run over by a car a couple of weeks ago. I just found out this morning. Anybody who has ‘lost’ an animal friend and companion will understand how grief filled one becomes. Post is also for those friends (now traveling home to Nottingham), and their dog. Happy days walking in the fells. Wonderful. Mable made it especially happy. She is a happy dog.
Listening Attention
A swan on her eggs. Listening. The M6 Motorway but a field away. She is sitting in her place. She is both doing something and not doing something. She is in effect saying yes and no at the same time.
My version of listening, of saying yes and no at the same time is to think in response to just about anything, I don’t need to do that now, or I don’t have to do that. Or I don’t need to think about this at the moment. In the end the words themselves drop away and the yes/no attention remains. And sometimes the words help renew the intention for a certain kind of attention. In life generally.
We talk about ‘returning to the place of meditation’, of ‘returning to stillness’ and that’s basically what I’m talking about here. However I’d say now, tonight, that one lives in an ongoing flow of refraining. Of Yes/No together. No gaps, not dual.
Certain Kinds of Attention
To be a moral
human being
is to pay,
be obliged to pay,
certain kinds of attention.
Susan Sontag
(the photograph is there because I love swans not to illustrate the quoted words of the wonderful Susan Sontag.)
Not High Airy Solitude!
I’ve been ‘sitting with’ my adventurous walk of a week ago on and around Grate Gable. Many thought pass through my mind, few stick. But one. The Lakeland Fells are CROWDED with people and while I love to be putting boot to rock there is the aspect of high airy solitude which I value (and enjoy). However the crowds are getting higher and higher into the air. And this video of HUNDREDS of people walking along Striding Edge on the flanks of Helvellyn depicts just what has been disturbing me. (the Edge is notoriously dangerous to scramble on by the way.)
Why am I disturbed? We can share the fells of course. Of course we can and that’s not a problem. So what exactly IS it? In myself and I presume in others is the seeking for experience, with the accent on seeking. Nothing wrong with experience it’s just that like anything else one wants MORE of what one wants. And that leads to suffering….because the more you have (experiences) the more you seek them. And they are never ever satisfied for long. But, or and, who was walking up a fell last Friday? Here’s where.
Helm Crag above Grasmere, said to be the beginners mountain. Quick to get up and down yet with the full ‘lakeland experience.