A life spent taking heed of Annie Dillard's advice to throw oneself into a mountain, or Hermann Hesse's call to look up at its distant, dark peaks, is a life that leaves no doubt of its fullness. As we approach the majesty of mountains, we begin to discover ours, modestly, as well. 

Such was the life of Anna "Nan" Shepherd (February 11, 1893 - February 23, 1981), a Scottish writer and Highland native who threw herself into this incomprehensible space her entire life.

The Living Mountain is a short, elegant work Shepherd wrote in 1945. Due to a lukewarm reception from a publisher, she held on to the manuscript for thirty years. Lucky was the drawer into which it was tucked.

Thirty years in the life of a mountain is nothing - the flicker of an eyelid. Yet in the thirty years since this book was written many things have happened to the Cairngorms, some of them spectacular things, things that have won them a place in the Press. ... Now, an old woman, I begin tidying out my possessions and reading it again, and I realize that the tale of my traffic with a mountain is as valid today as it was then. That it was a traffic of love is sufficiently clear; but love pursued with fervour is one of the roads to knowledge.   The latest edition of The Living Mountain is reverently introduced by Robert MacFarlane (who I am sure had a hand in its reprint). MacFarlane is a wonder himself, crystallized into our modern consciousness of nature. Like David Attenborough or Rachel Carson, he writes at the intersection of humans and place and has the energy of someone who has been given their last sentence (nature writers, in fact, always seem to be running out of time).   
 That being said, MacFarlane blows a tad too much oxygen into the delicate, tender pages of this book. I set his introduction aside and read it last, in order to read Shepherd afresh. I have a feeling MacFarlane would nod agreement.

The Living Mountain is about Shepherd's beloved Cairngorm mountain range in Scotland. Once higher than the Alps, these granite mountains were made from an eruptive core and chiseled within by ice and chapping wind.

The Cairngorm Mountains are a mass of granite thrust up through the schists and gneiss that form the lower surrounding hills, planed down by the ice cap, and split, shattered and scooped by frost, glaciers and the strength of running water. Their physiognomy is in the geography books - so many square miles of area, so many lochs, so many summits of over 4,000 feet - but this is a pallid simulacrum of their reality, which, like every reality that matters ultimately to human beings, is a reality of the mind.

"Big Sky" by Clare Millen.

The beauty of Shepherd's writing is her all-encompassing view of the mountain, from the geology and the history to the interplay of the minor things visible through the aperture of physical nearsightedness.

The more one learns of this intricate interplay of soil, altitude, weather, and the living tissues of plant and insect (an intricacy that has its astonishing moments, as when sundew and butterwort eat the insects), the more the mystery deepens. Knowledge does not dispel mystery. Scientists tell me that the alpine flora of the Scottish mountains is Arctic in origin, that these small scattered plants have outlived the Glacial period and are the only vegetable life in our country that is older than the Ice Age.

Intricate alpine flora in Arthur's Pass, New Zealand. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

The blue of the distance is "the light that got lost," Rebecca Solnit reminds us in her study of the beingness of lost. That blue is the depths of water and the distance of air. A volume that welcomes our imagination and demands we exhale ourselves into the space.

Shepherd describes this space and the light that enriches it.

Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere. It is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity. So on a clear day one looks without any sense of strain from Morven in Caithness to the Lammermuirs, and out past Ben Nevis to Morar. At midsummer, I have had to be persuaded I was not seeing further even than that. I could have sworn I saw a shape, distinct and blue, very clear and small, further off than any hill the chart recorded.

The most beautiful spaces in nature act like a mirror. I'm reminded of philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and physicist Alan Lightman, who both looked to the stars and felt their consciousness elevated.

"Learn to love your solitude." Illustration by Rupi Kaur in Milk and Honey.

So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling, grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow - the total mountain. Slowly I have found my way in. If I had other senses there, there are other things I should know.

 Anna “Nan” Shepherd.

In The Living Mountain, we see the mountain as a being. An embodied entity, an old friend, the calcification of all our memories, hopes, and dreams, and yet a place unknown.

I began to discover the mountain in itself. Everything became good to me, its contours, its colours, its water and rock, flowers and birds. This process has taken many years and is not yet complete. Knowing another is endless. And I have discovered that man's experience of them enlarges rock, flower, and bird. The thing to be known grows with the knowing.

Mountains - Shepherd's, Dillard's, Hesses', my own, and yours - exist in the greatest possible complexity. As Shepherd constantly notices, there is both an eternity and yet units of measure with each footfall; there is the fullness of life and constant death, joyous fear, revealing haze, vital water, knowledge, and mystery.

Shepherd embraces all of this, holds them up to the air, holds them close to her heart, and graciously hands them to us in The Living Mountain.   A generous offering of one's experience in nature is found almost everywhere these days, but few match the richness and curiosity of David Attenborough, Douglas Adams, or Gertrude Jekyll. Very different humans and writers, but all equally spellbound by nature.

Often, in my bed at home I have remembered the places I have run lightly over with no sense of fear, and have gone cold to think of them. It seems to me then that I could never go back; my fear unmans me. Horror is in my mouth. Yet when I go back, the same leap of the spirit carries me up.

As you drift on Shepherd's words, you might also enjoy Joseph Brodsky's love letter to Venice, written in a similar key as Shepherd, or Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark's respective writings on paths, journeys, and the delights of walking. And finally, Juni'chirō Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows, written a decade before The Living Mountain, whispers the same adoration of space, silence, wind, and giving oneself to nature.