Mount Macedon itself was veiled in thick fog. Riding to the memorial cross at slow speed felt like a moment in a nineteenth century gothic thriller, aboard a boat in the mist, fearfully yet bravely pushing forward into the unseen.
Rosy and the cross:
You can usually see Melbourne in the distance:
We rode to Lancefield in a rare afternoon glow: summer light breaking through fog and rain to illuminate the tree tops that swirled with cockatoos. There Rosy left for Melbourne, and I pulled out my map in search of roads I had not ridden before. I rode on a whim.
A derelict school house
A darkening day
Near the school house I stood beneath great pines and could feel (as much as hear) the wind high above. It evoked wonder and anxiety at the same time: the strangeness and mystery of the world, the oddly moving experience of feeling that strangeness. In such moments of sublime anxiety the world stands back and reveals itself: not what it is, but that it is. Its uncanniness. I discuss this experience and its relationship with anxiety and depression in my other blog, here.
Quietly changed in mood, I rode on.
To Pastoria, a place I'd never been.
A glow returned to the Earth, and strangeness changed to a feeling of warm mystery. Sometimes motorcycling reveals the mysticism of the world as perceived in our bodies. Contact with the ocean bears a similar experience, though different, to the sound of wind in pines. As a child the sound frightened me, but in a way which was not childish fear of an object, but a deep anxiety of the sort I have just spoken. Like touching a stick, the other end of which is touching something - you feel it through the stick. Some things in the world seem transparent in their limits, and I become quietly shaken by that vague perception of the nothingness or otherness beyond the boundaries of particular things, beyond the rambling sum of objects and their relations.
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