When I first read The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, I saw only aspiration. Nan lifted off the pages as a fierce, independent, unflappable woman. She was a talented writer, deeply connected to herself, full of wisdom and, in my eyes, the archetypal crone. To me, she was a matriarch and all at once, she became a sort of mentor; the kind of woman I might like, one day, to become.
In many ways, Nan is all those things. Her book is deeply wise, anecdotes from a life well-lived. A woman well ahead of her time and who lived outside the normal boundaries of gender roles, but when you begin to unravel Nan’s words, you see that she, like all of us, was just walking a path. Many paths really, invisible ones that saw her write The Living Mountain only to leave it in a drawer for nearly four decades and frozen paths that wound her through every inch of the Cairngorms National Park, a land she knew intimately through both feet and heart.
Nan moved with the kind of freedom that not knowing where you’re going brings to a person. She talks in the book of walking, foot over foot, until the way appeared in front of her. Of course, she knew that to walk for its own sake is the only true way to travel but I wonder too if some of the time, she wasn’t also simply lost, like the rest of us and whether her connection to nature, her hours of rambling the Scottish mountains, were simply her way of walking herself home. Nature does that to a person you see. It will always, without fail, walk you home.
I began my writing journey at six years old with felt-tip poems on old bits of cardboard and its taken me round the many mountains and moorlands of copywriting, novels, short stories and back, perhaps inevitably, to poetry again. You see poetry is my true north, a kind of gravity pulling me down and onwards on my own trail. But north doesn’t have to mean ‘North’, it simply means compass, a guide, like the sound of a distant river or the comfort of moss-sided trees.
People come to my writers’ group in many forms, sometimes with just their love of words but other times, washed up from the sharp tongues of long-ago teachers or beaten down by the tracked changes of peers who believe that writing is the sum of proper nouns and apostrophes. They come quietly, unwilling to share their prose, and poised, like deer, to run. They have stopped walking, stopped putting word next to word and in so doing stopped the path from unfolding in front of them. I have felt this way many times.
Beth Kempton in her book The Way of The Fearless Writer spoke of writing as ‘pathless, leading us not from here to there but from here to here. A path of waking up’. She is right and that’s what led me to set up Path Uncertain, the fact that all our journeys are uncertain. Every one of them is, at times, filled with a fear so great it causes us to pause- sometimes like Nan, for decades at a time. Through my small business, I run a trip called The Living Mountain Retreat. I run it because I want to help people begin moving again, set ink running across paper, wind against faces. Just as it now is on mine. I want to them to understand, as I am beginning to, that with each unsteady word, we are all just writing ourselves home.
Katie Flaxman
Katie is founder of Path Uncertain through which she runs writer’s groups, workshops and retreats. She helps people rediscover their voices and, in so doing, the paths that might unfold ahead of them.
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