The Hidden Fires by Merryn Glover

Author:Merryn Glover
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polygon

VIII.

LIFE: BIRDS, ANIMALS, INSECTS

Imagination is haunted by the swiftness of the creatures that live on the mountain.

When Nan Shepherd wrote about the beings she encountered in her Cairngorms wandering, she was not interested in purely factual information. ‘But why should I make a list? It serves no purpose, and they are all in the books.’ Her own book had a different goal: to recount how she came to know the mountain through a ‘process of living’. So, when she describes the birds and animals, it is not just their characteristics that she notes – although she does so vividly – but also the way they move and shape her. She tells how watching swifts in their ‘convolutions of delight’ made her laugh aloud with the ‘same feeling of release as though I had been dancing for a long time’.

It’s a telling metaphor. She had obviously experienced the loosing of inhibition that dancing brings – for those who enjoy it. I am a dance lover, too, and it was one of my majors at university. We learned about the kinaesthetic response: how our bodies can feel something we are observing. Shepherd did not use that term but she captured the idea exactly. ‘It seems odd that merely to watch the motion of flight should give the body not only vicarious exhilaration but release. So urgent is the rhythm that it invades the blood. This power of flight to take us in to itself through the eyes as though we had actually shared in the motion . . .’ One of the heartening things about this approach to nature is that it is available to everyone. You do not need the books or the information to be taken into the life of a living being. You simply need to watch.

Reading Shepherd has helped me take the time to do that gazing, to allow my blood to be invaded and my body to ‘share in the motion’, but what I have also found is that the more I watch, the more I want to understand what I’m seeing. To enter the life of these creatures with deeper appreciation and insight, to know them, in more ways than one.

* * *

At the end of a long day wrestling with words and technology and feeling failed by both, I head out for a walk, planning to go a long way at a brisk pace to work off the frustrations. But no sooner am I in the woods on the other side of the railway line than a bird’s call stops me. It’s a new sound. Or, more probably, the first time I have noticed it, picking it out from the general chorus of twitters and cheeps on this July day. It’s a high-pitched, two-note squeak, like the turning of a rusty wheelbarrow. I detect a flutter in the curtains of birch leaves and stand still, watching. The more I watch, the more I realise there are several birds darting through the canopy and across the thickets of the forest floor.

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