Roam.

Reading was not so important to my working-class community, unless it was the Bible.  Reading the Bible means that you can read anything else -- and it makes Shakespeare easy because the language of the King James version is also the language of Shakespeare.  We had a strong oral tradition in the north of England, and people often forget that not being able to read, or not reading, even fifty years ago, let alone a hundred years ago, was very different from not reading now.

We live in a 24/7 saturation bombing from enervated mass media and a bogus manufactured popular culture.  If you don't read you will likely be watching telly, or on the computer, or listening to fake music from puppet-show bands.  

When the families I knew in my northern textile town didn't read -- and they didn't -- they were in the brass band, or in the choir, telling their own stories down the pub or on the greyhound track, finding the quiet pleasure of mending kit or working the allotment, or walking for miles in  the Pennines.  I am not glamorising this working-class life; it was hard and short, and I could not stay there and I would not want it back.  But it had a genuine culture of its own -- roots up --and it was not force-fed adverts, consumerism and The X Factor.

The Living Mountain is the need to be physical, to be in the body, and to let the senses and the soul work in harmony with the mind.  This seems a long way from lying in bed and reading a book.  But it isn't far at all.

Reading stills the body for a while, allowing rest without torpor and quiet without passivity.  Reading is not a passive act.  Engaged in the book, in company with the writer, the mind can roam where it will.  Such freedom to roam reminds us that body and mind need exercise and activity, and that neither the mind nor the body can cope with confinement.  And if the body has to cope with confinement, then all the more reason to have developed a mind that knows how to roam.

Jeanette Winterson, from "A Bed. A Book. A Mountain.," the afterward to Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain

Perfume.

Plants then, as they go through the business of living, emit odours. Some, like the honey scents of flowers, are an added allurement to the insects; and if, as with heather, the scent is poured out most recklessly in the heat of the sun, that is because it is then that the insects are out in strength. But in other cases—as the fir trees—the fragrance is the sap, is the very life itself. When the aromatic savour of the pine goes searching into the deepest recesses of my lungs, I know it is life that is entering. I draw life in through the delicate hairs of my nostrils. Pines, like heather, yield their fragrance to the sun’s heat. Or when the foresters come, and they are cut, then their scent is strong. Of all the kinds that grow on the low reaches of these mountains, spruce throws the strongest perfume on the air when the saw goes through it. In hot sun it is almost like a ferment—like strawberry jam on the boil, but with a tang that tautens the membranes of nose and throat.

Nan Shepherd, from The Living Mountain

Prevent.

... [T]rying to prevent a few of the students who pass through our Institution from conforming altogether to the approved pattern.

Nan Shepherd

CONNECT

See.

This changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality. Then static things may be caught in the very act of becoming. By so simple a matter, too, as altering the position of one’s head, a different kind of world may be made to appear. Lay the head down, or better still, face away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs till you see your world upside down. How new it has become! From the close-by sprigs of heather to the most distant fold of the land, each detail stands erect in its own validity. In no other way have I seen of my own unaided sight that the earth is round. As I watch, it arches its back, and each layer of landscape bristles—though bristles is a word of too much commotion for it. Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker. This is how the earth must see itself.

Nan Shepherd

Thank you, Rachel.