Eldroth Harvest Festival, 6 October 2024
“It’s a grand thing, to get leave to live” – a lovely quote from the hillwalker and writer Nan Shepherd, from her memoir, The Living Mountain, a meditation on her experiences of years of walking in the Cairngorms.
“It’s a grand thing, to get leave to live” – there’s an almost childlike joy in these words. A childlike amazement at the wonder of life in the world around us.
Nan Shepherd wrote about the almost overwhelming experience of seeing things in nature on her walks among the hills.
“How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry?” she writes “The world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces. Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquillise the mind I do not know. … A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty.”
Another experience which she describes very well is that of walking inside clouds – on one occasion, above Loch Etchachan, “a cloud so thick that when the man who was leading went ahead by so much as an arm’s length, he vanished, except for his whistle.” She continues:
That cloud, like others inside which I have walked, was wet but not wetting. It did not wet us till, almost at the summit, it broke in hard rain, and we could at last see the corries, scarfed in mist. Some clouds savage the wayfarer on the heights – clouds from below, up here they are rain, or sleet – some nuzzle him gently but with such persistence that he might as well walk through a loch.
Or the wet may be more delicate, condensing in droplets on eyebrows and hair and woollen clothing, as has happened by morning with the dew after a night outside. Or the cloud may be hardly more than a sensation on the skin, clammy, or merely chill.
Once I was inside a cloud that gave no sensation whatever. From within it, it was neither tangible nor visible, though as it approached it had looked thick and threatening. We were on the flank between Sgoran Dubh and Sgor Gaoith, on a cloudless day of sun; and suddenly there was the cloud, making steadily toward us, with a straight under-edge about the 3000 feet level.
We thought: we’re in for it! But nothing more happened than that the sunshine went out, as though a switch had clicked; and in some twenty minutes the sun clicked on again, and we saw the level under-edge of cloud pass away across the Einich valley. Inside the cloud had been just dry-dull.
Nan Shepherd says that “To walk out through the top of a cloud is good. Once or twice,” she says, “I have had the luck to stand on a tip of ground and see a pearled and lustrous plain stretch out to the horizons. Far off, another peak lifts like a small island from the smother. It is like the morning of creation.”
Walking on a hill whilst “being aware, using the whole of one’s body to instruct the spirit” can reveal “a secret life one has and knows others have.”
This is the way a child receives the world, body and sprit alive together to all that is before them. And “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it,” said Jesus.
I’d say that Harvest is a festival which gives you and I permission to be amazed, in childlike wonder, at the world around us, for all the life expressed from the clouds in the skies above to the clouds sitting within our dale, and the clouds reflected in the lakes and gently flowing becks.
Harvest permits us to be amazed at the way that nature provides for itself, and for us, so generously. And because amazed, then grateful; and because grateful, then prepared to be gentle with all this life we share, and generous with all that nature gives to us.
Harvest is an occasion to be appreciative, with childlike wonder, and to recommit ourselves to caring for the earth, its creatures, the world’s suffering ones, and each other.
