Welcome into the vortex........

anarcho-shamanism, mountain spirits; sacred wilderness, sacred sites, sacred everything; psychonautics, entheogens, pushing the envelope of consciousness; dominator culture and undermining its activities; Jung, Hillman, archetypes; Buddhism, multidimensional realities, and the ever-present satori at the centre of the brain; a few cosmic laughs; and much much more....


all delivered from the beautiful Highlands of Scotland!






Tuesday 20 April 2010

Gentle shamanic training


I have come to a not-very famous mountain, which goes by the name of A'Chralaig. It's actually the highest mountain hereabouts, but not greatly frequented; most people visit once only. The reason is directly in front of me: a 600 metre-high (almost 2000 feet) uniformly steep wall of pathless, flattened yellow grass, peat, heather, and large stones. I know that at the top there is a ridge - I've been here before, one of the few -, but to get there means climbing this great south wall of A'Chralaig.


Herein lies the test. Conventional wisdom would have it that this is a relentless slog, devoid of joy and destined to erode your very will to live. Animistic shamanic consciousness knows different, though - 'knows', note, not 'believes'. Everything is holy, as the poet said. Every stone, every tuft of flattened yellow grass, brims with significance. The training consists of learning to experience this, in every situation and at every moment. Tell a piece of heather that it is somehow less significant because it happens to hang out on the uniform slopes of A'Chralaig rather than on a much-photographed hillside above Balmoral, and it will quiver with confusion. Just so.


I start to climb. The sun is shining, the wind is blowing in hard from the west, and the sky a ceiling of hazy blue. In order to encourage shamanic consciousness, various strategies are in place: 1/ Don't go too fast. Excess speed belies a sense of 'get this out of the way as quickly as possible.' 2/ Forget the goal. 'I'm here to get to the top of a mountain' is false thinking. Every moment is to be savoured. 3/ Don't look at the map. The hills are free of cloud, and I know where I am going. Frequent map gazing is all about seeing how far you've gone, how much height you've gained, how much torture still to go. Irrelevant distractions from the task at hand.


For reasons mysterious, I appear to be fairly fit. I climb steadily into the more rarified dimensions of mountain wildness. After a while, I'm stopping more frequently for short rests, but I take this as a natural part of the process.


There is still plenty of climbing to do once the ridge is attained, but it almost seems effortless. The spirits of the mountain tops are different, as I've written about before. Huge snowfields still cover the upper slopes, and the bizarrely huge cairn on the summit of A'Chralaig is half-buried. I continue kicking my way along the snowy ridge, then look back towards the summit reaching into the sky like a great spire. The graceful, white, serpentine curve of the ridge provokes a deep sense of, well, I don't know what. 'F*****g brilliant planet!' I yell spontaneously into the ethereal atmosphere.


The REAL test is coming off the mountain. Six hours on the hoof, beginning to feel weary and jagged round the edges: impeccable awareness is not easy to maintain. Incredibly, I stumble upon a path-of-sorts tumbling down the slopes, but it seems to follow a particularly steep section of the hillside. The outside of one knee begins to give trouble: mild iliotibial band syndrome. It's not the first time. I had it two years ago, when descending one of the most isolated mountains in Scotland, six hours' walk from the nearest road (eight hours with iliotibial band...). A rhythm is soon established, however: descend for a short distance, exclaim 'ouch' loudly, wiggle and extend knee, then repeat process. Maybe it's some god or spirit speaking:'Slow down, slow down. Tune into the everpresent satori, expand into interconnectedness.' Who knows?


A shaft of sunlight cuts across a hillside, briefly lights up the loch below, and is gone....



Anyone for Plant Food?


Plant food, anyone? If so, you're too late. Alan Johnson, UK Home Secretary and world-renowned expert on such matters, has declared mephedrone a Class B drug, as from last Friday. The evening before the ban came into operation, the hills around Inverness were aglow with bonfires, as the local kids burnt their stocks before the midnight hour arrived and they turned into horrible little criminals.

More than two minutes with most of the mainstream media on mephedrone and you feel as if you've taken an overdose of contaminated barbiturates. Misinformation, lies and callous propaganda from politicians and their colluding buddies on TV and in the papers (the Guardian is apparently an exception on this one). To find out more, you need to look elsewhere. For general education, Erowid ('Education, education, education' was the mantra of phase one Tony Blair; shame he didn't put Erowid on the national curriculum), and for news the relevant portals on Drugs Forum, are good starting points.

The problem with mephedrone is that it is a new kid on the block, so nobody knows anything about its long-term effects (unlike substances such as MDMA and LSD, which were pretty fully researched before the politicians sagely put an end to all that nonsense). As with other substances of mind-alteration, from caffeine to crack cocaine, mephedrone has its enthusiasts and its detractors. One media lie is that it has killed twenty-something people in the UK. It has been implicated in that many deaths, but only one of these has actually been proven. My reading and the occasional anecdotal report suggest that this is a pretty dodgy substance; on the other hand, it must have something going for it, since so many nightclubbers have clearly taken to it.

If people have indeed died as a result of taking mephedrone, one thing is clear to me: the blood is on the hands of the politicians! It is they who have blindly and cynically persisted with their stupid drug policies, which prevent proper research and education, let alone open discussion, denying availability of lesser risk substances and driving the supply of drugs (apart from alcohol and tobacco) into the hands of criminal mafia. Any parents suspecting their kid has died from taking mephedrone should take the government to court.

Underlying what I am saying, and what most of our politicians are too bigoted and cowardly to get into their thick skulls is this: KIDS WANNA GET HIGH! Older folk too, but young people appear to have a particular propensity for this type of activity. And this wish ain't gonna go away anytime soon. So, far better to get it into the open, regulate it responsibly, take it out of the hands of criminals and minimise the harm. As it is, the Conservative Party is boasting it's going to be 'even tougher on drugs' than Labour, a policy that's frightening and going to cost even more innocent lives. Bizarrely, in the run-up to this year's non-event of fake democracy, the only person who seems to be suggesting anything honest about drugs is Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP. OK, so we'll all be voting for them now....

Unfortunately, a lot of older people remain part of this sorry state of affairs. It is sad that, by the time they reach 36, most adults have forgotten their own all-night clubbing, dope-smoking, pill-popping late teens, as if it never happened. Selective amnesia: does it confer evolutionary advantages (better ask alternative culture favourite Richard Dawkins...)? For the record, I hate the word 'high', but what is wrong with wanting to 'get high', so long as you're not messing yourself up big-time? Adults do a great disservice to younger people by patronising them about drugs, and marginalising them in the process. Altering consciousness appears to be one of the most basic of human drives (actually, it's not just humans; gorillas in west Africa, for example, have been reported munching hallucinogenic plants and running around madly.....). Most cultures throughout history have had substances and other means of influencing what goes on in the mind. Not to mention our psychedelic prehistory; see 'Supernatural' by Graham Hancock for starters. Meditation, fasting, chanting, drumming, standing upside down for long periods of time; sleep deprivation, flotation tanks, high altitudes; smoking, snorting and eating plants. There are loads of ways people have gone about it, and still do.

Meanwhile, around the time the mephedrone frenzy was peaking, two local teenagers died at the bottom of the road I walk to work. Their car smashed through a wall on the corner and into an architect's grounds. It was a poignant sight, to see the flowers and football shirts arrayed outside as I walked past. Strangely, such occurrences fail to create the same clamour: killer cars should be made illegal. Which leads to the main point, sort of: everything has an agenda. Sometimes secret, normally unspoken. Maybe collusive, maybe unconscious. But mind alteration isn't part of the dominators' agenda, while turn-of-the-button, no-need-to-walk-beyond-the-driveway convenience is. It's as simple and as difficult as that. Keep those antennae tuned into 'secret agenda channel'. There's always something worth listening to there.
P.S. Good news for river toads everywhere; the charges against Bouncing Bear Botanicals have been dismissed. Not surprising, since they were all completely false anyway. Slightly ominously, the police have stated that they are continuing their investigations. Which sounds a bit like 'OK buddie, we didn't get you on that one, but we're gonna get you on SOMETHING.' Nice people.
In the pale green vortex parallel podcast, it's time for some music from that unwitting princess of the magical muse, Natasha Khan, aka Bat For Lashes. Her fantastic cover of the Cure's 'A Forest'.

Sunday 11 April 2010

The Centre of the Brain


He swam oceans thronging with multi-toothed carnivorous marine dinosaurs, fast-moving diving sharks, mythical monsters, and brightly-coloured but ultimately poisonous darting fish

He fought his way through thickets teeming with snakes, venomous spiders, armies of dark flying insects and predatory tigers

He engaged in life-and-death struggles with demons, angels, friends, foes, ghosts, gods, winds, animals, and himself

His friends on his journey were brigands, buccaneers, outlaws and outcasts; witches, wizards, poets, shamans and people of soul

His allies were assorted animals, spirits of plants, places, mountains; potions, plants, and the energy that encircles the cosmos come what may

His foes were the television people, the politicians, the people of money, law, and power, and other builders of the great necropolis



Many were the battles he fought, running; there were times when it all appeared too much, and he fleetingly felt tempted to fall upon his own sword

Until, one day, while eating a late breakfast, with a shaft of morning sunlight falling on a jar of peanut butter placed in the far left-hand corner of the table, he inadvertently stumbled into the very centre of the brain



Where he found



a deer clattering down a hillside at dusk

an old woman waiting for a bus to nowhere

a four-inch strand of mottled brown seaweed beaming magnificent in its uniqueness

a Zen master burning books at midnight

a young woman's nipples erect in the morning sun

a walnut tree trembling with excitement in the knowledge that he also knew

a cloud pass in front of the moon, then dissolve

three million years of hard-won but ultimately futile human endeavour explode in a yellow flash, then disappear into the night sky

a sodden clump of sphagnum moss vibrating subtly in connection with every other single thing in the universe

a stone by the roadside reflecting everything that ever had been and is yet to come

an old man standing by the evening sea as the rain lashed down, and a tear fall from his left eye as his heart opened slightly

a fourteen year-old boy and twelve year-old girl clasping hands for the first time, and smile

a woman being lifted from a hospital bed and taken home, to die

a lone heron watching, one eye on the stream, the other in eternity



He wiped the crumbs from his mouth and smiled

Saturday 3 April 2010

Getting rid of nature


nature: the physical world in terms of landscape, plants, and animals, as distinct from human creations (New Penguin English Dictionary)

'Nature' has meant many different things to different people. There's 'nature red in tooth and claw.' Selective bullshit. Equally unrealistic is a sentimental romanticised vision of nature, communicated, for example, through some of the paintings of the nineteenth century German artist Caspar David Friedrich. Then again there's David Attenborough nature, put forward in numerous television documentaries. According to this view, animals are solely preoccupied with the search for nourishment and reproduction, kind of sophisticated food and sex machines. Mr Attenborough has done lots of fine work for the world, but his vision is ultimately reductionist, and thereby fails the test.

The best thing would be to throw out the idea of nature completely. It is innately divisive, suggesting a false and irreconcilable split between 'human life' on the one hand, and 'nature' on the other. It alienates us from 'nature', by setting it up as something 'other', and in this way separates us from our own deeper nature, which is inextricably linked to the greater multidimensional reality of the cosmos. The word smacks of Judeo-Christian separatism, and the fatal delusion that the world 'out there' exists for the benefit of 'us'. It doesn't. 'Nature' is a fabrication of the separate-ego fallacy. Egos conspiring to maintain the great lie, of their own superior separatehood.

I recently had my first day among the mountains for three months. As almost any Highlander will tell you, it has been the coldest winter here since 1962-63. Actually, I still recall that extraordinary winter from my youth, though I was living in Buckinghamshire in the south of England at the time. In particular, I remember standing in the garden and feeling the weak but unmistakeably warm sun on my face, for the first time in months. I was bathed in a sense of great relief and bliss at the passing of the extreme cold; I must have suffered greatly during that winter past.

I digress....

Today, a fast-moving yet curiously constant canopy of cloud moves across the tops, while streaks of snow are painted viciously across the mountain sides. Rainbow colours cast a shallow curve across the darkened crags of Beinn Liath Mhor briefly, to fade away then reappear in an instant. After an hour I approach the tall, slender cairn marking the crossroads of paths through heather and rock. It stands prominent, and with a few prayer flags flapping in the wind it could pass for a chorten in Nepal or Tibet. I reflect how it is maybe no accident that the finest flowering of Buddhist Tantra took place in the high, wild places of the Himalayas. The air is rarified, and the film separating us from gods and spirits is wafer thin. By the sea, Milarepa and Padmasambhava just wouldn't pass muster.

Following the winter, the landscape seems in shock. Long grasses flattened, and an eerie yellow colour after so long beneath the snow. Heather trampled, timid; a lone frog struggles to hide itself in the mud on my approach. Only the bog plants emanate a sense of 'at homeness'.

Then there are the meltwaters. Paths transformed into waterways, normally small streams turned into raging torrents, the water pools on theAllt Coire Lair become dark, bottomless pits. Water everywhere.

As I climb further into the yawning basin of the coire, pellets of ice (a Highland speciality at any time of year) begin to spit from the sky straight into my face. For a few minutes I stop and turn my back on them, so the ice shards fall onto my shoulders and harmlessly to the ground.

I reach a lochan at the top of the coire, still frozen over with ice. The clouds part for a moment, revealing snow-slashed, almost vertical mountain slopes tumbling towards the little village of Torridon in the middle distance. Then the view is gone, and I am alone again with the wind and the cloud. I climb steep slopes to my left, struggling to follow an indistinct path as it cuts up the waterlogged hillside and disappears beneath patches of dirty grey-white snow. On the crest at last, I know that the main summit lies to my left. The map tells me that it is not far, but in the thick atmosphere rocks come and go like huge grey apparitions. Crags fall away on either side, so I opt instead for the smaller summit to my right. No path here, and I feel like a pioneer, the first person to set foot on this rocky spur. I arive at the highest point, however, to find a small cairn built by previous travellers. The cloud once more envelops me in its chill embrace, the north-west wind speaks sternly. Slowly and carefully, I set off home.......

Friday 2 April 2010

Too early for television?


It's 9 am. Nobody in their right mind is watching tv at this time of day anyway. Make the mistake of switching on, though, and it's pretty turgid stuff. BBC Breakfast and ITV GMTV: anodyne celebrities promoting their latest anodyne projects; 'experts' opinionating on the subjects that someone somewhere has decided are what we should be concerned about; the usual dose of fear-mongering to keep us in our place. It's enough to make you bring up your cornflakes.

Alternatively, tune into the kiddies' channel. Mr Prank, Crazy Keith the koala, and Nev the bear are up to high jinx in 'Bear Behaving Badly'. If you're going to watch television, there's a case for majoring on children's programmes, some of them at least - if they don't involve puppets or cartoons, they should be regarded with considerable suspicion. The kids' programmes don't take themselves so seriously, and inhabit a less time-conditioned dimension than those of the adult world, where every day's news needs to be different, every day a move on from the previous. And all taking the great human project so tediously seriously. Boring...

'Bear Behaving Badly' is probably my favourite. The name itself is a play on 'Men Behaving Badly', a popular comedy series from the 1990s for grown-ups. Nev the bear, the star of BBB, actually embodies many of the qualities of the great Zen Master of Buddhist texts. Untramelled by the boring conventions of normal adult society, his behaviour mirrors that of Zen wisdom spontaneity: 'Eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired, crap when you need to'. And, it being kids' tv, 'when you feel the need, burp very loudly'. Despite coursing in spontaneity, he is far from naive, and sports a wily, cunning side, reminiscent of coyote. He frequently comes up with novel solutions to the problems that crop up (which they do, of course, frequently), thereby demonstrating a lateral, creative mode of thinking, with harmonised left- and right- brain functions. Ok, some of the acting's a bit crap, and one or two story lines are a bit thin, but you can't have everything, can you?

Rather more disquieting is the distinctly trippy quality to some of the programmes intended for really young kids. Maybe that's how our babies experience the world; or maybe it's a reminder to their parents of what they're missing, and an exhortation for them not to settle down too much. Whatever, it's all there. Take a trip into 'The Night Garden', for example. The pristinely primal colours - blues, greens, yellows -, cut-out origami-style trees and flowers, the weird, alien-looking beings with their bizarre names - Igglepiggle, Upsy Daisy, the Ninky Nonk -, all reminiscent of the plastic doll world that Timothy Leary wrote about.

Or there's 'Lazytown'. Again, the preternatural colours (we also see them in the occasional Pre-Raphaelite landscape, but this is definitely not kiddies' territory) and wacky characters. There's Sportacus, hyperactive superhero on steroids; Stephanie, a pink-haired, dancing, jumping marginal pubescent; arch villain Robbie Rotten, a middle period Elvis Presley lookalike gone horribly wrong; and a load of bug-eyed puppets whose jittery behaviour suggests they all dosed up on amphetamines for breakfast. Totally surreal, probably not intended for kids anyway, and far more watchable than anything the early hours of the day can dish up on the other channels.

'Inverness, We Have You Surrounded'


One of the finest vistas in the vicinity of Inverness is that westwards, looking up the stretch of water known as the Beauly Firth. Walk out on a fine day to the point where the Caledonian Canal enters the firth, and the eye is led onwards by the water, and beyond to the mountain tops north of Affric. As the mind softens, the soul is drawn into stillness and silence.

This great view westwards has recently acquired an additional feature. On a clear day, the newly-erected wind turbines at Fairburn can be spied, making their own special contribution. When the wind blows, their constant chopping of the air destroys the stillness of the scene. On a calm day, if the sun is in the right place, their silvery glint detracts from the sombre, deepening quality of the view.

Look north from the Moray Firth coastline - or, for that matter, from the low hill ten minutes' walk from my house - and the wind farm to the east of Ben Wyvis impresses itself on the mind. To the south, there is the huge wind factory at Farr, straddling the Monadhliath Mountains, and clealy visible from many locations around.

Head east from Inverness, and nearly every small town seems to have a wind factory in its environs. Not visible from Inverness itself, but a prominent feature from many mountain tops and ridges, is the Millenium Windfarm, just off Loch Ness. Ditto the soon-to-be-built Lochluichart shrine to desecration. Yes, the Scottish Misgovernment's plan to turn the Highlands into an industrial theme park is progressing very nicely, thank you.

I have recently finished reading 'The Wind Farm Scam' by John Etherington. Some of it does not make for easy reading for a person like me, with its talk of rotors, hubs, and windshafts; megawatts, gigawatts, and load factor. Later chapters, however, on 'Landscape degradation and wildlife', for example, and 'Misrepresentation and manipulation' are compelling. In general, the book confirms much that I already knew, or suspected to be true. The bottom line is, as Mr Etherington concludes in chapter seven: 'They {wind farms} are money factories which industrialise the landscape for no other significant purpose.' And remember that the author is not some weird far-out like me, but a retired Reader in Ecology at the University of Wales, and former co-editor of 'Journal of Ecology'.

Do not imagine that the constructors of wind farms wake up in a cold sweat at three in the morning worrying about the fate of polar bears. The only thing to induce such a reaction would be a nightmare in which the government had cancelled their fat cat subsidies. Renewable energy is big business, and for many of the people involved it could be anything. Tesco, coltan from the Democratic Republic of Congo, arms to Nigeria, it's all pretty much the same.

Actually, the supposed need to combat human-made climate change is a supreme example of dominators showing their true spots. It could, conceivably, have been a great opportunity to involve ordinary people, by emphasising energy efficiency and promoting local projects above all else. Local identity and empowering people is the last thing that the control system wants, though. Instead, it's a case of rolling out the blueprint: bring in the multinationals, set up large faceless projects (eg wind farms) involving huge investment, and maintain the dominators' myth: power and money for the chosen few. To see a bunch of alien metal-and-plastic monsters that you don't want go up on your doorstep must be a distressing and horribly disempowering experience. Which is exactly what the dominators want, above all else: disempowerment of the masses.

The Lochluichart/Corriemoillie project was a particularly controversial one. It is proximate to several prime wild mountain areas, and was vigorously opposed by the Mountaineering Council of Scotland among others. The small local communities of Garve and Achnasheen were split amongst great bitterness, as an occasional look at the local paper, 'The Ross-shire Journal', made clear. Most local people opposed the plan; nearly all the neighbouring estates objected. Highland Council approved it by what seems to amount to subterfuge. Announcing the Scottish Misgovernment's green light for Lochluichart, the Scottish Minister (I think it was Puppet Muppet Mather again) proudly proclaimed 'This is exactly the kind of project we want to support.' It is, I have noticed, an increasingly common characteristic of control system envoys to make absurd statements that fly in the face of all evidence, reason, and truth. Later, however, I came to realise that, for once, a politician had told it like it is. A project that most of the people affected don't want; a well-executed case of 'divide-and-rule'; a situation where power and money circulate amongst the dominators of big business and politics, keeping everybody else in their place. Yes, it is exactly the kind of project they would want to support!

As usual, language tells its own story. Master Local Puppet Salmond talks about Scotland becoming 'the Saudi Arabia of renewables.' With due respect to the Saudis, they may not be the most perfect models of freedom, democracy, and respect for Gaia. Though, to their credit, they do at least produce something that does the job properly. And a few weeks ago, in this case talking about marine renewables, the local press compared it to the Klondyke. Well, there is certainly a Wild West feeling about a lot of this: Scotland's wild places are up for grabs, with zero regard to their innate value, so let's get in there quick while there are still renewable obligation certificates for the taking.

I reserve the strongest of my Gaian rage for the so-called 'environmental groups' who have thrown their weight so vociferously behind the industrialisation of wild places. Save the planet by destroying it: sound convincing? How much of their blind support is due to misplaced ideology, how much to infiltration by the big boys of business, and how much to what depth psychology might term unconscious archetypal activity, I do not know. But Friends of the Earth certainly are not earth-friendly, the Green Party is as green as a red herring, and the funding of the World Wildlife Fund is a topic of its own, I believe. In short, a lot of the 'environmental movement' gives the impression of a bunch of rather nasty little ideologists. And ideology, as we know, is a dangerous thing. See the Green Party member on television, exhorting the Scottish Misgovernment to build more wind farms now, now, NOW! The glint in his eye was scary, like a person possessed. 'I shall throw a tantrum if I don't get my way - NOW!' And the new leader of Greenpeace International glibly telling Andrew Marr on his Sunday morning television programme: 'We want to see more wind projects in Britain. You have a lot of wind. Of course, not so much sun.' Kneejerk reactions. Bullshit. Why do these people get so much media time anyway? Nobody voted them in. My antennae also detect a kind of collective shadow projection at work, onto the word 'carbon'. This was evidenced by oh-so predictable objections to proposals for a new coal project in Ayrshire, fitted with the latest carbon capture technology. A project that, unlike the Lochluichart wind fiasco, might actually make a difference. Carbon the destroyer; Shiva at large in the world. Environmentalists, go see your shrink.

In conclusion, the 'environmental movement' is generally dancing to the same tune as the rest of the control system: scientific (sort of and selectively), materialistic, reductionist, totalitarianism. No real awareness of connectedness and our kinship with everything else. No sense of love for the hills, the heather - or the wind. At the mercy of their own unconscious configurations. Lost....

'The Wind Farm Scam' is worth reading as a classic example of dominator tactics, and the consequences of 'human separateness' psychology. In case you were wondering, here are just some of the points: wind farms produce little energy; they need constant back-up eg coal, gas, or nuclear, for when the wind doesn't blow; they and their electricity are expensive, heavily subsidised through government and paid for by consumers; they destroy landscapes and wildlife; most people don't like them; their consequences for tourism, house prices are obvious. The spirits of the hills are not happy, either.


Here is a poem I wrote in 2007, before the Corriemoillie wind factory had been approved. In the poem, Beinn Liath Mhor Fannaich is a nearby mountain:


Fannaich Epiphany


Beinn Liath Mhor Fannaich; nothing
save the silence of the spheres
skies stretched in all directions
intimations of eternity

And the wind

Once-upon-a-time cornices
now grey-white streaks in the Fannaich wonderland
their fairytale spent for another year.
Mascara smudged white on a grey-green mountainside
the show is nearly over

and the wind

Below, water, rare blue sparkling
Beyond, An Teallach, rock stegosaur
and north, far north, strange shapes in Assynt;
origami, cut-out mountains
primeval forms stark against a soundless blue
immeasurable

And the wind
Yes, always the wind

Eastwards, the gaze led along a valley,
trouble stirs: Luichart, Corriemoillie.
Spectres rise of a future undetermined
but dark the vision in the eye of the Fannaich wind:

Mean metal monsters waving in the wind
blades scything through silence.
Harvest! Harness! Tamed at last
the winds of Fannaich

They do not ask a lot, the gods,
or so the Greeks said:
recognition, respect, homage in proper time.
Pay them their due, and all will be happy.

Now come the metal machines, mocking the gods
of the hill, the stream, and the Fannaich wind.
Triffids come steel-grey in modern times
twisting being into becoming
and misery shall follow as night follows day.
So sing the gods, and the wind
on Beinn Liath Mhor Fannaich

A jumbled pile of stones
hardly a summit cairn;
white-bellied ptarmigan waddles over
as if drunk on the wind.
Intimation of eternity
On Beinn Liath Mhor Fannaich