The Living Mountain (Canons): A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland: 6

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And there it was coming back, upstream now, the same vast span of wing: no body that I could see; two great wings joined by nothing, as though some bird had at last discovered how to be all flight and no body. This was a drawing together and fusion of her own knowledge and experience of the area, of her interest in spirituality and philosophy and literature and people annealed into a beautiful end product.

Nan' Shepherd’s incredible ode to the Cairngorm mountain range is the perfect book to curl up with after a day spent out rambling, or on a slow Sunday morning with a mug of coffee. Written in the 1940s but unpublished until 1977, Nan Shepherd’s intense, poetic exploration of the Cairngorms is now recognized as a classic. She deeply appreciates “her” mountain but sometimes my own appreciation of her book is limited to the beauty of her language and her talent. Nan Shepherd logged decades in Scotland's Cairngorms, a mountain range in that country's northeast, and wrote a book about her relationship with those mountains in the 1940s.Heel fijn onthaastend boek om te lezen, prachtig geschreven vol liefde voor de bergen van de Cairngorms, waar ze in een dorpje aan de voet ervan, haar hele leven heeft gewoond. But there was an anonymous quote from this very newspaper on the back: "The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain. But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time. I think the Robert Macfarlane quote on the back of the book sets it up really nicely: "Most works of mountain literature are written by men, and most of them focus on the goal of the summit.

And Shepherd's book is a grace accorded to her readers, who seek inspiration to engage with mountains and geese, deer and rivers, clouds and mist, and by doing so, to regain a sense of their humanity in a world that rarely takes the time to listen, really listen. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. She explicitly refers to Taoism and Buddhism and the way in which interaction between human physicality (being in the body) and seemingly 'lifeless' matter is nevertheless possible.

She had a great economy and compression in the way she wrote, drawing out the essence of each of her very varied experiences of these mountains in a paragraph or two. The book is published alongside the music composition ‘The Living Mountain’ written by Thomas Larcher as composer-in-residence at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (2019-2020). I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength. Drafted in 1945, published in 1977, the slender book is a meditation on Scotland's Cairngorm Mountains, and a master class in listening to and seeing the landscape from someone who dedicated her life to being fully present in these mountains.

Data that can be obtained through this is limited to the URL of the pages that have been visited and the limited information a browser might pass on, such as its IP address. This slim book of essays is an account of Nan Shepherd's lifelong explorations of the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. They rise from the granite, sun themselves a little on the unsheltered plateau and drop through air to their valleys. It is like a new element, and if water is still sounding with a low far-off murmur, it is no more than the last edge of an element we are leaving, as the last edge of land hangs on the mariner’s horizon. By setting foot sideways to the growth of the heather, and pressing the sprays down, one can walk easily enough.In addition to the cookie controls that we mentioned above, if you are a Facebook user you can opt out by following this link. Even though it is so short, Shepherd still manages to covey the sense of place, the beauty and the wildness of the Cairngorms with such amazing brevity. Mucho más allá de una experiencia mística, espiritual o física, ella se adentró y vivió la montaña como si fuera una parte indivisible de ella.