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

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I have carried a piece of juniper wood for months, breaking it afresh now and then to renew the spice. It was a long time since I’d read the book when I first listened to Sturgeon’s album, and what I heard was something poetic, beautiful and haunting, and I think this would have been the case even if I had never read Shepherd’s work at all.

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. 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. An impassioned ode to Nan Shepherd's beloved Cairngorm mountains in the Scottish Highlands, her poetic descriptions and astute observations transport the reader to this beautiful, remote and rugged landscape. Shepherd's eureka moment comes when she concludes that there is an "inner" mountain as well as the much more distracting outer one. What both works show us is that a powerful part of the global cultural zeitgeist revolves around environmental concerns.Folio commissioned Hokyoung Kim for the artwork, while the late author’s wife, Wendy Benchley, provides a fascinating new introduction. In Robert Macfarlane's sensitive introduction to The Living Mountain, he describes Shepherd's struggles with writing after that time. I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength. Shepherd sent it off once, received a polite letter of rejection, and then left it in a drawer until 1977, when Aberdeen University Press printed a small edition. The title for both the composition and this book is taken from Nan Shepherd’s book of poetic prose on the Cairngorms mountains that she wrote in 1942 and which was first published in 1977.

But while reading it, they are – because of the power of the surrounding writing – fleetingly visible. Of course, these songs are not about those places, but they became forever linked with them in my imagination.While mountains have been considered sacred sites by many civilisations, the Himalayas hold a special place. Nobody is spared – not the colonisers or the formerly colonised; not even the scientists among the Anthropoi counselling “sustainable development”. I loved how the author put forth the notion of the life-force, the spirit of the mountain (as a stand in for nature more broadly), which has been destroyed as a result of unthinking human intervention. Indeed, it is perhaps the greatest compliment I can give to The Living Mountain is that a piece of writing so deeply connected to and rooted in a specific place, can have such resonance with someone who has nearly no personal experience of it.