Still Dancing: Passages among the Early Spring Trees of Highland Perthshire (2024)

I had not planned to travel to Scotland. I followed lines from a book as they led me there, like the stairs on the near slope in the photo above and the dirt path further in—two of many passages I would find through the early spring trees of Highland Perthshire.

The passage that compelled me was a clear invitation to move from one place to another: “Now and then comes an hour when silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time. Such a silence is not a mere negation of sound, it is like a new element...” (Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, p. 96). Reading those words, I felt myself slip out of time and into this new element.

I came across this passage quoted in a book that I had requested as compensation for my review of a manuscript submitted to Bloomsbury Academic Publishers. I had requested this book, The Art, Literature, and Music of Solitude, hoping for camaraderie among others who seek and savor solitary states. What I found instead was more encyclopedic than inspiring, more tortured than celebratory. Most of the quotes from artists, authors, and composers included in this scholarly text focused on forms of loneliness prompted by separation from other human beings or from the self. They did not evoke the forms of fullness that can come of being out of the physical company of other people but still in their spiritual company—as through pages they have written.

In contrast, Nan Shepherd’s words brimmed with the insight and inspiration that I had hoped to find in The Art, Literature, and Music of Solitude. I had never heard of Shepherd, or her book, The Living Mountain, or the mountain range about which she wrote, the Cairngorms, located in the northern Highlands region of Scotland. Coming upon those few animated passages, though, I felt moved to slip literally, not only through reading, into the element Shepherd described. I resolved to celebrate my 60th birthday by traveling to her mountains, on my own but with her presence in passages.

A map of Scotland reminded me how much time the drive from Edinburgh to the Cairngorms would take me, so I chose a place to stay at the very base of the national park that takes the name of the mountain range. This warm and welcoming room, called The Bolthole, sits just across a quiet lane from the Birks of Aberfeldy, made famous by Scottish national poet Robert Burns, and looks out at the Glen Lyon hills.

Vaguely remembering “bolthole” from The Hobbit, I looked it up to find that it means a place to escape from other people, a refuge. Perfect. Like Shepherd’s words, the room appeared crafted to hold elemental silence and to offer a solitary space for fullness.

To take refuge is also, I learned from my friend Alice, an expression in Buddhist terms of commitment to the path of awakening.

I had not been consciously aware that I was making such a commitment, but something in me must have been ready.

And so, in spontaneous response to living words, I chose to follow and to make a passage to the vicinity of Shepherd’s living mountains, if not the living mountain that she had written about. I would travel in April, before the tourists descended, before the midges hatched, and, most importantly I would discover, before the early spring trees leafed out.

I decided not to read The Living Mountain before I got to The Bolthole. Once I started reading, I realized that I was fortunate to have let my desire not to spend my time driving dictate where I chose to stay. The altitude, the austerity, and the rarified atmosphere of the Cairngorms were what compelled Shepherd. But they sounded way too harsh and intense for me, certainly at 60, and probably ever. Instead, I let the hills closer to me, still in the Highlands but offering a different kind of wildness, be the terrain I explored. I vowed to embrace the opportunity to wander both the actual topography and the spaces within me that they opened. With Glen Lyon, pictured below, as my mountain muse, I walked and wrote every day what I found and felt.

Each passage that follows draws on selections from the journal I kept while I was in Scotland in April of 2024 infused with excerpts from texts I read during and after my trip. Each traces a movement from one place to another, through a particular natural landscape and into myself. This tracing is a form of translation: a finding or forging of words to capture experience that is also always a creation of a new version of the self doing the finding and forging. In translations, something of previous terms and selves is also preserved—and something new is always realized.

Passage 1: The Birks of Aberfeldy

The paths through the Birks weave through huge, old trunks covered in moss and lichen, at once muted and luminous as they stand on the edge of spring. Before other greens begin to sprout, the trees’ strong roots are visible on the forest floor blanketed with last year’s leaves. In a state of suspension between seasons, the trees appear still, waiting for warmth. Their leaflessness creates its own kind of silence, not a negation of sound, as Shepherd notes, but rather a new element. I can hear anticipation, preparation, although those words are too human. I can hear, and begin to feel, just presence.

I start to pay attention in a new way that feels less about filtering and interpreting what I take in and more about feeling open to what I am present to while also feeling more present in myself. I had worried when I booked my trip for April that I might feel bored and bereft without the leafed-out branches to fill my senses with tree-ness. What I find instead is a greater capacity to attend, both permission and invitation to perceive outwardly, as well as a silence that allows for a different kind of internal listening.

The solitude I experience here—in terms of social withdrawal—is filled with the company of non-human beings, their presence deepening my own. Shepherd writes about seeing animal tracks in the wilds of the Cairngorms: “one is companioned, though not in time” (p. 30). This kind of presence in and also slipping out of time—or experiencing time as not only synchronous but also perpetual—is something Shepherd’s biographer writes about, I discover later, as a form of presence, of being, of looking at once and always outward and inward.

While Shepherd was probably not familiar with Buddhism, her insights were resonant with some Buddhist principles. For instance, meditating on the relationship between knowing a place and knowing oneself,

Shepherd wrote:

“Knowing another is endless....The thing grows with the knowing” (p. 108).

The literal journey over the topography of the mountain, Shepherd writes, “is a journey into Being; for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own” (p. 108).

Shepherd’s biographer, Charlotte Peacock, links Shepherd’s insight to Zen principles as articulated by Suzuki: “Whatever teachings there are in Zen, they come out of one’s own mind. We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way.”(1) This kind of being, being without, and being with all came more clearly to me in the still silence among the early trees of spring.

(1) Daisetsu Teitar Suzuki, 1934, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, quoted in Charlotte Peacock, 2017, Into the Mountain: A Life of Nan Shepherd, p. 29.

Passage 2: The Hermitage

Domesticated in the 18th century for the Dukes of Atholl, the woods of The Hermitage are located in Dunkeld, Perth and Kinross, on the banks of the River Braan in Craigvinean Forest.

The forests and waterways harbor a tame kind of silence, wood and water clearly sculpted by human hands, but the tall, straight trunks of the evergreens stretch beyond where they took root. I jot these notes as I wander through their stillness:

There are no straight lines in nature

in space or in time

and if you slow down enough to notice,

every line

is a desire line.

The concept of a “desire line,” from landscape architecture, refers to the paths walkers choose and make regardless of the ones that have been laid out: across grass, for instance, rather than along the paved routes. In the silence of the domesticated woods, I see the growth of the trunks as a form of desire line. In my own yard, I’ve seen stems and trunks bend around fences and buildings, seeking the sun. In the woods of The Hermitage, the trees’ trunks stretch through the bright air in a silent soaring skyward.

Shepherd writes: “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” (p. 2). This quality is evident among the dense trunks of the evergreen forests as well as in the mountains. Seeing this light feels like listening through looking.

Passage 3: Killiecrankie Path

On the only rainy day of my visit to Perthshire, I walk part of the Killiecrankie Path—15 miles of nearly empty old roadway starting in Pitlochry and winding through forest trails and wide vistas, like the one pictured above, along the River Tummel. Here I feel closest to Shepherd’s living mountain because Pitlochry is considered the gateway to Cairngorms National Park.

At one turn in the path, through the evergreen trunks, my eye is drawn to feathered and somehow internally luminous trees on the edge of Loch Faskally. The photo does not quite capture it, but although there is no sun, it seems that the light is emanating from the leafless branches.

We use the word “dormant” to describe the winter state of trees, and of course it’s true that they are not producing leaves or flowers. But “dormant” sounds too inactive, too lacking in animation and awareness; that’s not how the trees feel to me. The absence of leaves makes me more attentive to the always aliveness of the still dancing the trees are doing internally even when they are “sleeping,” their luminosity their life.

Passage 4: Carie, Perth and Kinross

The Kilvrecht Trail follows the Carie Burn, a stream that rises in a corrie (a steep-sided valley formed by glaciers), between Carn Gorm and Meall Garbh in Highland Perthshire. The burn descends into the Rannoch Forest and, after four miles, falls into Loch Rannoch. Douglas firs, Norway spruce, and oak trees grow in dense groves around the Carie Burn, lining the dirt trails that wind through them.

Having noticed the still dancing trunks in The Hermitage, I notice anew the trunks of these trees. Their close proximity to one another makes the space feel dense but not crowded. Here I discern a slower dancing, and the wind blowing high up through the needles of these evergreens makes that rushing sound, like water running—a kind of harmony with the actual water running in the burn.

Between and among the trunks, there is space to discern. The new element of silence Shepherd describes is not just of sound; it is also of place, external and internal. It makes me more attuned to what can be filled and what is already full in what I see and hear and feel. It feels like capacity,

both in the sense of capaciousness and in the sense of potential. The space among the trunks engaged in the their still dancing invites feeling with multiple senses at once.

Passage 5: Alt na Bogair

Close to the Kilvrecht Trail, Alt na Bogair traverses an entirely different landscape—another element, it feels like, another kind of presence. This passage winds up a gentle slope to a hilltop covered almost completely in birches.

Toward the end of the week I will see birch trunks luminous as Shepherd describes them: “Exquisite when the opening leaves just fleck them with points of green flame...[when]...in a low sun, the spun silk floss of the twigs seems to be created out of light” (p. 53). Here, I see them as she also describes them in that passage: “loveliest of all when naked.” In this still stand before the leaves have begun to break, clouds mute the light so that the whites and grays of the trunks and the browns and blacks of the branches rest easily on the eye, without bright contrast to sharpen their differences.

Earlier, I had passed through a different stand of birches, in the just-rising sun, at the other end of the day that Shepherd evokes, and while they certainly had the luminous quality she describes, they also exuded a different kind of radiance. It is difficult not to anthropomorphize, but the trees looked as though they were having some sort of secret meeting, a gathering or a ritual, or were simply standing in their perpetual state of celebratory being. As I drove through the stand, divided by the road, I felt not so much that I was interrupting them—if they noticed me, they gave no sign I could discern—but rather as though I was coming upon them, suddenly and unintentionally, catching a glimpse into their always. A quick slipping into and back out of their time.

Passage 6: Loch Rannoch

A small trio of birches stands on the banks of Loch Rannoch. The sunlight on their trunks catches my eye as I drive back from Carie toward Aberfeldy. The tilt of their trunks makes me think of how their underground, invisible, rhizomatic life leads to their angling upward, how their subterranean movement stabilizes their still dancing above ground. The ridges of their trunks, like hundreds of horizon lines, echo the ripples of the water behind. These patterns of movement that do not transport the wood or water anywhere are the essence, what Shepherd called the elemental nature of nature—of what I am able to see in slowing down to look at these woody stems.

Passage 7: Rob Roy Way from Aberfeldy to Kenmore

There are many paths along the River Tay, including an 8-mile stretch between Kenmore and Aberfeldy. In some parts of the passage the trail skirts the river, in others it passes through grazing fields for cows and sheep, and in still others it is on the A827, which is a relatively quiet road, at least in April. I walk this trail on one of the last days I am in Scotland, and already the leaves have begun to spring out on the tree branches. The white of the birch trunks and the green of the moss, even as little fists of leaves start to unfurl on the branches, still hold a simple kind of illumination—a different feeling before the complexity of leaves takes over. Light illuminates to varying extents, depending on how much of it there is. That is obvious literally, but to attend carefully to this physical phenomenon is to experience it metaphorically as well: illumination—to recognize and realize and understand differently, not only what one experiences but also the self.

I had thought I needed leaves to feel full among the tress. The still largely leafless trunks teach me that I can be more fully present when my senses are less full. Or rather, they give me a new image and experience of what I already know: that overfull senses, particularly sight and sound for me, only temporarily energize but ultimately enervate me, and I actually spend more energy sifting through what I discern than being present to it. This is what my friend Alice calls leaving off sifting through what is discerned (the work of the conceptual mind) to being present in a stiller more inwardly and outwardly attentive way (the being mind). Shepherd offers what she comes to understand as full presence as the culminating learning from her living with the Cairngorms: “I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. To know Being, this is the final grace accorded from the mountain” (p. 108). This learning and experience of being are what I sought when I chose to follow Shepherd’s words to Scotland. What I didn’t know until I was there was where I would find such insight. I didn’t know that the early spring trunks would offer me—and that I would reach for in them—the balance of line and light from which to discern both outwardly and inwardly in a more balanced way.

Passage 8: The Birks of Aberfeldy

I conclude my week in Perthshire with the same walk with which I began it, although in reverse. When I start out, the Birks are shrouded in heavy fog. Even in this light, the trunks are luminous, shining with “effortless intensity,” as Shepherd puts it.

The spring work of sprouting leaves is about to begin in earnest, and this leafing will replace the silence of the forest with a constant stream of sound—sometimes a gentle swishing from the breath of a soft breeze and sometimes a howling dance with stormy gales. The leafing will also shift what is visible to the more complex weave of trunk, branch, and foliage that I now more deeply understand fills my senses with one kind of perception of life but does not afford the stiller contemplation of trunks alone, wrapped only in moss—the greater balance,

for me, between outward and inward discernment of my own aliveness.

The “Bolthole” is an escape to be sure—a place away from people, a kind of retreat—but it also a place of “inscape.” I make that word up to complement “escape,” and find that Gerard Manley Hopkins has used it to signal the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. Hopkins links this idea of individual identity to religion, which resonates for me only in the root of the word religion—to re-bind (religare). For me, the re-binding is to the abiding life of trees, but in a more elemental way. The re- binding I have done in the element of silence and in the presence of still-dancing trunks has been possible because the trees were not yet complicated with leaves. I feel such gratitude for the opportunity to contemplate the cores both of trees and of myself—to have taken refuge also as commitment to the path of awakening.

My friend Alice suggests to me that the trees’ being in the leafless part of their cycle mirrors the solitude of my chosen state in the cycle of my time, my entry into the 6th decade of my own life and also this time of reading and heeding other people’s passages. My journey from northeastern Pennsylvania to the southern Highlands of Scotland afforded me this opportunity for re-binding because it traced a desire line—a passage I chose to make drawn by Shepherd’s passages. The trees, uncomplicated with leaves, woke my sensory mind with the moss-furred bareness of their trunks, and I was able to be newly present to the woods and to myself. The slowing and opening of my perception, in the early spring light and among the early spring trees, let me attend to and also experience still dancing.

Passage 9: Findings

On the day I leave Aberfedly, I buy Findings by Kathleen Jamie on the recommendation of the man behind the desk in Oakholm Books. In one of her beautiful meditations, Jamie writes: “This is what I want to learn: to notice but not to analyse” (p. 42). This is also what I had wanted as I wandered among the trunks. But the mind jumps to metaphor and to anthropomorphizing. Maybe there is no other way for the overeducated human mind to perceive and name the connection to nature, the relationship, the exchange...although those, too, are all human perceptions. Does nature experience any reciprocity in the presence of people?

The heavy fog that fills the crevices of the Birks of Aberfeldy on my final day makes the tree branches into webs—wood strands spun with lichen, still largely leafless.

In another meditation in Findings, Jamie writes, when her husband had been gravely ill: “I had not prayed....But I had noticed, more than noticed, the cobwebs, and the shoaling light....Isn’t that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?” (p. 109).

These questions remind me of Mary Oliver’s lines in “The Summer Day”:

“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass,

how to kneel down in the grass

how to be idle and blessed...”

Presence. Attention. Reverence. But without anthropomorphizing. Or deifying.

Can the religare at the root of religion be just about that kind of re-binding—to what animates?

Passage 10: Still Dancing

For my 60th birthday my father sends me a copy of Daniel Mason’s North Woods, another exploration of place in which trees play a major role. Reading this book at home, I am bound back to my meditations on still dancing among Highland Perthshire’s trunks of early spring when I encounter a character in the book who experiences a kind of transformation. After having been in a deep depression, she comes across A Key to All Bark on a library shelf—a serendipitous finding like mine of The Living Mountain. She uses the key to identify trees in the woods, and the experience lifts her out of her depression: “It was as if she had been made aware of a structure to the world, an architecture that existed beyond her and which her sadness could not consume” (p. 345). Mason continues: “It was then that the winter forest underwent a transformation. As if something she had thought was dull and monotone had revealed itself to be a place of secrets and discoveries. As if the world were restored to what it was meant to be, a place much greater than herself” (p. 345).

I took my journey to Scotland from and in a state of joy, not depression, but I too gained perspective, revisited my self in relation to the natural world, perceived larger patterns.

The element of silence into which I entered and the discovery of what allows for a better balance for me of outward and inward discernment are the gifts of Being the early spring trees of Highland Perthshire gave me and that I gave myself.

I take this photo of birch bark on my last day in Scotland. The patterns and colors of this trunk feel like runes of a different kind of passage, an invitation to join the still dance, and an affirmation of the choice to “dance with curiosity.” (2)

(2) Alice Lesnick et al., forthcoming, Practice Dialogues. Lever Press.