SOME THOUGHT FROM THE TOPSHills are complex yet subtle - from afar they look just like bumps in the otherwise flat land; it’s only close up, supernatural, once you’ve struggled with it for a while that you realise its complexity and sophistication.
Hills as perches and outlook towers are unrivalled in their capacity to offer sight to the blind, to offer the evidence of a bigger picture to the skeptic.
It is a curious coincidence that the word perch when consulted in a dictionary is found to lie between two words which appear inextricably connected to its intrinsic nature. The preceder is the word ‘perceptual’ (relating to the ability to interpret something through the senses); the sequitur is the word ‘perchance’ (by some chance).
Flowers on the hillside flow. This is why they are called ‘flowers’.
As mammals with an outer porous membrane it is conceivable to think that when upon the hill, open to the elements, and in the midst of all this space and light, the world flows right through us.
As heliotropic entities (especially we hyperboreans) it is perhaps understandable how a proximity to the sun, and the only star in our solar system, can induce a state of bliss and unfettered jouissance.
Hills contain, at every point of their scaling, secrets.
The hill, as a once powerful volcano, represents a sleeping earth giant who once, in ancient times, broke through the integument of earth in order to be reunited with the sky.
At its summit, the hill, like sunlight, surrounds you, and yet offers you illumined freedom.
Atop a hill, even on a cloud ridden day, I still feel the sun.
On a clear day from even the most modest hill the curvature of the earth at once imperceptible suddenly becomes clear. We do not have to go sub-orbital to appreciate the blue and green planet.
Schiehallion, as the sacred Celtic mountain, makes itself known on each and every summit.
At the top of the hill we are naked - temporarily stripped of our conceptual cloth. With the doors of perception cleansed, the infinite makes its case. From the top of the hill, the void becomes visible in its vast open space.
Everyone needs an elemental thrashing once in a while and the top of a hill is the ideal place for it.
One doesn’t need to go to extremes with a hill. It is open to all. This flexibility is a hill’s greatest asset.
The hill, like peace, is silent. The mountain, like pain, is dumb.
The quality of a hill is not measured by its height but by its view, and gift of the void (the absence of blockages) which it holds from its top. Hills needn’t be ‘high’ to offer a panorama of the surrounding landscape. Indeed, depending on the topography of the outlying land a hill need only be a few feet from the ground to enable an alternative sighting of the environment.
From up here, halfway up the sky, there is a fluency to the aerial imagination, a sense of wonder in which all things are perpetually fresh.
In the high blue depth, surrounded by the elements, heated by the sun, there is the reverent sense of being within that which has not yet come.
There are many advantages to be had from a hilly city none more so than the mental strength it conveys through its infusion of a subtle mathematics. There is poetry to these curves. Curves which fall into that ground between order and chaos and which mathematicians refer to as complexity. Total order and total chaos are equally uninteresting for their perfection and predictability. With the curves of an uneven floor we have the beauty of an equation still in progress.
The flat city, on the contrary, being able to see straight ahead and with everything in full view, benights the imagination and leaves nothing to chance. Flatness is a demon that rages long and wide, bringing with it a terrible topography.
At the top of the hill embrace your solitude. Make it work for you! When the universe recognises you, remind yourself that you are, in spite of your solitary nature, accompanied every step of the way.
Up here, I am no slave, but the earth, it owns me.
A hill with its trickling streams and fresh air is nearly always the perfect place for a distillery, or a temple, or mind.
From the heights, the bens, the fells and braes, the peripheral kingdom of Glasgow’s earthly skirting board, the city with its high rise concrete pillars when it doesn’t resemble a cancerous spread, resembles a graveyard with its grey pitched tombstones.
The materialised man sticks fast in the mud of his consumption; whilst the dematerialised float off, hypaethral, into the hills.
Clouds are the stars of the days, vagrant and evanescent constellations.
On high, the wind teaches you to talk, the heights teach you to listen.
On the Hill height bears a direct relationship to depth. Indeed, the mind in many ways resembles a sort of inverted depth charge, whereby the higher it goes the more likely it is to go off.
There is something primal (umbilical) about engaging a hill and reaching its zenith, the apogee of that point furthest away from the earth (population) - and the point at which you have seemingly left behind a plague of people. Walking up a hill I often have the strange Orpheic feeling of having left behind a tenebrous cacophonous underworld in which perpetually moving machines grind.
