Do you feel comfortable with mystery?
For little mysteries are the bedrock of your nature.
Where do the words come from, that gush through you like blood? Or quietly feather your lips like a sprinkling of ash from the moon?
Last night, for the first time, I underlined a sentence in a book I’ve been re-reading since I was nineteen years old. My younger self seemed to guide the ghostly grey swipe of the pencil. One sentence captured the essence of an entire story — my story. But why was it eerily resonant now?
One of my favourite writers, Nan Shepherd, devoted her life to exploring the Cairngorm mountains in Scotland. She never sought the summit (despite climbing it often). She sought something deeper; an intimate connection with the unexplained.
Her rewards were abundant and unsettling:
Water […] like all profound mysteries, is so simple it frightens me. It wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away. It does nothing, absolutely nothing but be itself — Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
Like water, our own nature bubbles up and flows away.
If you were to observe your own inner plateaus, the peaks and gushing springs, the ominous corries and hidden watercourses, if you were to record how each feature had been shaped by wind and water, the colour-shift of each season, luminous in winter like the stoat’s bridal-white pelt, coarse and moulting in summer, only to grow back more lustrous than before, then your journal would overspill a mountain’s worth of little mysteries.
Such a short time to know them. Can you summon the patient curiosity required to track them to their undefinable source?
Like always Kate, your words and post really made me think and ponder. Maybe because I have been comfortable with mystery my entire life, I've spent it learning about science and how things worked, from a wristwatch to the universe and back down to atoms and molecules. which if I get started talking about, this would turn into a small book. But, my greatest mystery to solve of all was learning about myself. Exactly like you mentioned. The journey, like Nan Shepherd climbing the Cairngorms is making me learn the mysteries and nuances of myself that I never even knew existed. Not sure if I'll reach a summit either or if there is one, but the journey is opening my eyes to vistas that make this life so much more deeper, meaningful and beautiful. So, Thank You once again for your thought provoking, beautiful and mysteriously inspiring words.