A time to re-wild your soul

On a bright spring weekend in early May six of us set out from Spean Bridge on a Highland Wilderness Earth Journey through the glens of Lochaber. Here Pennie Stuart, a participant on the journey, shares her experience of the weekend. How gifting herself time immersed in the landscape was an opportunity to re-wild her soul.

Wild Roots: a time to re-wild your soul

Packs abandoned by the side of the stony track, a soft south westerly raising the surface of Loch Ossian into wrinkles, we come to circle a great slab of grey granite. With our senses newly sharpened, shaped and tuned to this landscape, we’re each of us drawn to the curious forest of lichen covering the stone. A reef of charcoal and silver petals, a burst of orange here, vivid violent green just there.

It’s everything I can do not to rub and run my fingers over the surface, I’m itching to press the palm of my hand down, to smooth the creases and crevasses out, instead I settle to gently stroking a thumbs’ width of moss. It’s so much like a seascape I almost jolt when I look up and discover I’m not submerged in water but immersed in another landscape. This landscape, a Glen of bog cotton and birch, sphagnum and heather, a place where we 6 have chosen to re-wild ourselves over the past 3 days.

Shona, soul searcher and spiritual guide to the group, invites us to draw a soft-edged line under our time together with a reflection on what we’ll take away from the trip. My mind wanders loosely back to Friday morning when we first gathered in Spean Bridge to discuss the preamble over coffee. A self-selecting group of not quite strangers, each connected to at least one other member of the group in myriad ways but none of us knowing each other quite completely. As if you ever could.

Setting out

I’m not sure exactly what landed me here but there was something in me in need of re-wilding. Since Christmas I’ve been stumbling around trying to locate a direction of travel. Frustrated by injury and its recovery, floating through life’s flotsam and jetsam, I’ve felt unable to quite reach my toes to the bottom to find anchor. In these pockets of time, more often than not, I turn to landscape to search for answers to whatever it is that’s unravelling me. To see if there’s a natural remedy to my unfocussed ills. So, when I stumble across a timely Facebook post from Shona about the trip, it felt like a calling, a re-wilding was exactly what I needed.

And I guess it’s that curious draw to find our reflection in the landscape which unites us 6 as we shoulder our packs under a vast blue sky and head Southeast on a steep and stony track, the mass of the Grey Corries looming to our right. As we move, acclimatising our bodies and breath to the heft of our packs through sweat-soaked clothes we slowly get to know each other. The joy of time spent in the company of like minded others is the ease with which we mine into each other’s lives. I’m rewarded in soft and subtle ways, surprised by how much I find myself leaning in to the generosity of care we instinctively show each other.

Towards the possible

On this weekend, where my body feels unsure that it will cope with the challenge of walking and carrying, already I feel nurtured and nudged towards the possible. Shona and Anna, our mountain guide, also nudge and nurture us to towards the idea that we haven’t come here to climb great heights or race, if anything we’re here to slow down, to pause and observe, externally and internally so we can work towards weaving ourselves into this place.

As the path reveals more of the landscape, moving between its folds we too journey within, sharing snippets from our lives – stories of love, loss and laughter, children and travel, of beliefs and broken-ness, conjuring up the people who mean most to us and by the time we come to rest by the bothy at Lairig Leacach in addition to us 6 we’ve summoned a silent army to keep pace with us. It seems an opportune moment for Shona to shepherd us back into silence, into a practise of intensely listening to the landscape, noting each note with a paper and pen.

Soundscapes

I head up to sit on the steps of the Bothy, my back against the heat of the rough wooden door. Closing my eyes, I drift and let the sounds of the burn and the birds rise up. In my mind I alternately turn the volume up first on one then the other, selectively plucking sounds and moments to linger on, tasting each on the tip of my tongue. As we gather back together Shona reads from her collection of poems and now her voice. Words weave their way into and through the natural soundscape we’re all suddenly attuned to. Already we’re becoming re-wilded, our framework has shifted.

Sit here and bide a while

We push on and find a place to camp in the glen between Stob Coire Easain and Stob Choire Claurigh. Perched up where the land suddenly drops away and Allt na lairige tumbles itself into a series of pools and perches, water rushing into short icy falls. We all change then one by one pick our way barefoot down the steep stony sides to plunge into the highest pool, loving the way the icy water steals over our sun-baked skin, turning us pink and bumpy.

Laughter comes easily and freely as we acclimatise to each other, we’re more relaxed in our skins, the remoteness having sanded away nerves and anxieties associated with the journey. As we eat and smile and share it seems quite impossible that we only met that morning.

A mountain to climb

Early the next we make our way up Meall Mor. Climbing up away from our campsite and the waterfalls, moving slowly through the rising heat, our packs bringing each to a quick and sticky sweat. It was a collective decision to go up but I too feel raised, off-balance, nervous that my body won’t rise to the rise of this challenge.

I’m snagged by the memories of when doing things like this were so much easier, when I’d have laughed at this even being a challenge. A small sadness tugs away at me with each step as I picture illness and age combining to press me back down towards the glen.

But press as they might under the hot Spring sunshine, I don’t in fact buckle. I take my time and plod on and up and when I pause to drink and drink in the view I’m taken aback to see just how far I’ve come, both in that moment and in life.

We stop towards the summit and Anna calls on each of us to find something in the geology of the hill that snares us. Then, one by one, we visit each other’s finds as she unveils the story of how the landscape was formed. That knowledge tucked in our pockets, Shona then suggests we draw the landscape. Our pencils fuelled by the freshness of our thoughts and Anna’s stories.

Honesty flows

And because we’re sitting here on top of this hill, soaking in the landscape in silent companionable contemplation when we come to speak again I feel able to be honest. I confess to how frightening it is that my body feels so compromised. That being in this landscape is both an escape but also a reminder of what I’ve loved and lost.

And instead of being judged I’m simply asked “can we help?”. While my instinct it to bat back a solid and stoic “no, I’m fine”, something about this place and these people. Their generosity releases me to say “yes, yes I need help getting my pack on and off, the rest I can do”. Then gently here on this hill side a trade is done. They give me the gift of help and in return I give them the warmth of thanks and the weight of my frustrations shifts a touch.

The mirror of landscape

Later that day we set up camp in the shadow of a petrified forest by the southern tip of Loch Treig. Once again Shona invites us to go and connect, to closely observe, feel, think and share. I find an old boat, once a ferry perhaps. Its peeling white paint crusted into barnacles on the bough, rivets weathered to silver. I search for significance as I run my fingers across a series of curious numbers and letters etched into the metal below the gunwale. I’m deeply aware of the hands which must have crafted them, listening for the voices of the men who once rowed her out into the Loch.

“What do you see?”, Siobhan, my partner for the exercise, asks? I see stories and scars and layers of life and living; a vessel which is broad enough in the beam to carry people who are loved and precious, perhaps to feed and sustain, nourish a need. So, under all the peeling paint and broken-ness I see beauty.

Me. I want to whisper. Perhaps I see me?

Then we gather by the fire, singing and smiling, secure now in each other.

Encased in the glow of possibility

On our final morning I’m greeted by the sound of rain on the tent and the gift of a coffee and porridge while I’m still in my sleeping bag. My world has slowed to a pause. Easy now, teasing and laughter bubble up at every turn as we leave Loch Treig and continue East along a track strewn with butterwort. We’re at ease too with slipping into a more mindful way of being, of tuning our senses to the sights, sounds and smells around us. We’re no longer on this land so much as of it.

Finally, we turn our backs to the hills and make our way to Corrour Station and the promise of coffee and cake and a real toilet from where we’ll catch the train back West, but not before we’ve gathered for a final time and rested our hands on the lichen covered seascape of the granite stone and turned our thoughts to Shona’s invitation to consider what we’ll take away from all this.

And while undoubtedly, I’ll take away the joy which comes from the warmth, intelligence, and thoughtfulness of these people I’ve journeyed with, I decide most of all I’ll take away the knowledge that this is possible, that I can still find ways to connect with this landscape I love, that there are different ways of moving through the world, ways which keep changing and evolving regardless of age or adversity.

Then with one final poem from Shona we re-gather our packs and head back to the land of mobile phone signals, flatwhites, hot showers and life, encased in the glow of possibility.

Pennie Stuart June ‘23