I am new to the blog, but because of my background and interest in outdoor and reflective writing, I was brought on board, mostly for my own learning. I earned a master’s degree from a unique program at a university called Bath Spa in England that specializes in literature, landscape and environment. In the lush greenery of Wiltshire and Somerset counties, I encountered chequered pastures, historic market towns, and prehistoric sites. My education was focused on the British tradition of writing about landscape, tracing a history of reflecting on how the terrain and climate of Great Britain has shaped writers’ ideas about national and individual identity for the last several centuries. I wrote on poets like John Clare, England’s true naturalist, whose known world, the 20-mile radius where he grew up, was material enough to write hundreds and hundreds of poems about the myriad of experiences in the tiniest of bird’s nest or to the borderland of his home, what he called world’s end. Jane Austen’s characters often went through strange changes when they traveled from the country to the city or vice versa. Like heroine Fanny of Mansfield Park who was bounded by the country house of her cousins, superior to her in class and education, she hardly ventured alone out of doors while there. Yet, at home in her seaside town, quite oppositely, Fanny’s sense of self was without fear or hesitation as her class or experience were not in question.
These writers have contributed to a tradition that has brought a greater sense and understanding to how landscape shapes our sense of self. The most influential writer I came across in my studies was a Scottish author named Nan Shepherd who continues to shake my understanding of our conception of self and of the physical world around us. Hers was a lifetime of outdoor education walking and hiking the Cairngorm Mountains west of Aberdeen, Scotland. Shepherd’s eighty-four page philosophical musing on The Living Mountain is her most influential work that has recently been resurrected from obscurity to a greater recognition for how it helps rethink a relationship with the natural world.
Robert Macfarlane, British author and travel writer, examines people and place, which is perhaps why when he discovered Shepherd for himself, he said that she reshaped the way he saw the Cairngorm Mountains. Shepherd wrote, “Often the mountain gives itself more completely when I have no destination,” which Macfarlane took as his directive as he walked the paths several years ago that she described in her book. Thanks to Macfarlane’s attention and exposure of Shepherd’s work, a new generation of readers like me can travel with her as she wanders the mountain landscape of her home, peering into the nooks and crannies as she called them, revealing the deeper life of a living mountain, as alive as herself.
Shepherd’s work is an endless source of the possibilities of being in a mountain landscape. She states, “It is a journey into Being; for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own.” Her method is not limited by conquering a summit or traversing a known path over and over, but instead, of visiting and knowing the mountain, as one would visit and come to know a friend. One of the greatest insights I gained from reading The Living Mountain is in her purpose of walking the mountain: “it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living.” Her moving through the landscape of the mountains—walking, hiking, sleeping—is a “process of living,” but one that is done in search of knowledge.
Outdoor and reflective writing seems to inherently embody what Shepherd knew so well. Of course, not all ventures into nature and into wild landscapes have to yield the deep philosophical considerations that Shepherd achieved over her lifetime. I think what it can do, however, is become a “process of living” as Shepherd tells us. We search for knowledge when we write, and that process is engaged with coming to know our essential nature. Walking and hiking and experiencing the outdoors can become the teacher for us to begin that process of reflection, and it can last a lifetime.