Breathless

“The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.“

The northerly climb out of Ullapool rendered me breathless.

Despite his cheery greetings, I was unable to respond to the Range Rover driver who stopped beside me as we gazed into the Deep Freeze Mountains. Finally, I managed a nod of acknowledgement and he left me leaning heavily against a roadsign as I slowly recovered.

My body was telling me how much I had earned the view.

The calm Borderlands had been coaxing me towards a different sense of orientation within the spaces that formed my route. Cycling into the Highlands, wind and gradient had both pushed and pulled at me, surfaces had rattled me, rain had splashed down on me and flown upwards from my wheels and, this morning, sweat had run freely from my brow.

Yet, slowly, I was feeling more grounded in the landscape.

There is a kind of attunement that opens us up to the possibility of a non-rational, emotionally, intuited way of living in the world. Rather than passing through, we find ourselves sinking in, immersing ourselves into the spaces around us in a way that invites us to ‘care’ differently about them. The miles had done their work on me; my ‘bike tour’ was slowly shifting into something reverential, more spiritually akin to a pilgrimage, perhaps…?

We’ve become disconnected from our deeper sense of place, skimming across the surfaces of our predominantly urban, industrialised, consumer experiences. Yet staring towards the blue distance of Stac Pollaidh, the breeze chilling me as my perspiration spirited away, I could see differently into the iced history of these mountains, the travellers and settlers who had lived and toiled here, the way the landscape had been shaped by our presence and how it was now reaching into my own, inner landscape and psyche.

Sixty years ago, in The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd wrote that these landscapes evoke a sensuality such that ‘the body may be said to think.’ Writing of her beloved Cairngorm, she tells us that we don’t travel through the mountains but our essential bodies take us into them. As her writing invites us to blur inner and outer topographies into one, she goes on, “I began to discover the mountain in itself, everything became good to me, its colours, its waters and rock, flowers and birds.”

Rationality and science have served us well, but the complex, existential problems we face now mean that we need to feel our way into a different sense of participation with the world. We need to care deeply enough about our planet to avoid the worst of the damage that we are bringing to the ecosystem that supports us. This is a sense of care that exists beyond intellectual consciousness; it is embodied and inspirited within us, born of our essential selves.

We need to be rendered breathless by colours, water and rock, flowers and birds. Which in turn, means that we need to find ways to attune to the quality, pattern and rhythm of our ecology.

Back on my bike, gravity pulled me down the road into Assynt as the Range Rover driver passed me with a toot and an exchange of friendly waves.

And I slipped back into the quietness of my breathing and the simple effort of turning the pedals.

Notes:

There were plenty of motorcyclists touring the Highlands though I’m not sure what Robert Pirsig would have made of the experience. After all, he thought that Zen was the spirit of the valleys rather than the mountains. Nonetheless, I have a spare copy of his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ready for the moment when my original copy finally falls apart on me.

Nan Shepherd’s devotional account of her experiences on Caingorm in The Living Mountain is increasingly seen as nature writing at its finest. I suspect it won’t be too long before my copy becomes so well thumbed that it will need a replacement, too.

Finally, treat yourself to a few moments browsing the Best of the Best Scottish Poems. My favourite? ‘Here lies our land’ by Kathleen Jamie.