I had some water, a little bit of snack food and a light day sack, containing a few basics.
I had a few miles to go over rough but walkable, mostly uphill ground to walk before I reached the mountains.
Pete and Dave had left earlier and driven several miles down the road to walk the ridge.
The plan was that I'd meet them at the end of the ridge nearest the campsite.
Of course, they never made it, the ridge was too long and technical to traverse on a whim.
I was left to walk the couple of miles to the base of the mountain alone and, when I got there,
to scramble up a fairly easy route somewhere between The Great Stone Chute and the Cioch.
The only living things I was aware of were midges, a constant cloud of little annoying black
dots. They seemed to taper off with increasing altitude.
Now, I've never had much of a concept of "the divine", or of anything non-physical greater than myself.
That day, a couple of hours trek from the nearest human, alone and with only a few resources in
an environment in which it's all too easy for a simple, clumsy mistake to bring grave consequences,
I was both consumed and enveloped with a sense of almost overwhelming awe and connection to the environment.
Of course, much of that was from the range of the Cuillins stretching out for miles, bare rock above and below me. The sky seemed infinite, and all of human concern was beyond microscopic. I actually felt a part
of the world, not an actor on a stage, but part of the stage itself, if I may mangle that analogy.
That was the start of a spark which led to me investigating what is usually termed mysticism.
I still consider myself agnostic, and either atheist or pantheist (or both, if you're able to entertain
the notion of seeming dichotomies as mere parts of a whole), and I've rejected a lot of what passes
for religion, occultism, magic(k). But I think there is something in that mass/mess of philosophies, rituals,
beliefs, symbols, etc from which we can relearn our connection to the world.
It's often claimed that we cosseted Westerners live in a constant state of disconnect from the natural world.
We have no reverence for our ancestral roots, or the land which sustains us. We treat animals as mere commodities, whilst considering those who live in harmony with the land & animals to be somehow more primitive. I remember a documentary program I saw a while ago where a "primitive" tribesman (I forget the location, or of what "level of civilization" they had 'acheived') was explaining how they returned animal bones to the areas in which they hunted them, as a mark of respect. While we bulldoze animals into industrial mincing machines to make cheap, unhealthy, unnourishing garbage passed off as food. Yet THEY are the primitive ones?
Maybe they are, but they've retained something we've lost and which all of our fancy toys cannot replace. I don't consider all ancient knowledge to be "correct", of course a lot of what our ancestors believed was purely superstitious and not based on what we would now consider to be positive evidence.
I'm not advocating discarding our technologies, because any line drawn would be entirely arbitrary.
A flint axehead is technology, as were many even simpler tools. We're constantly progressing blindly away from our past, but new toys, new techne, new knowledge should complement old/existing ones, not replace them. I find that luddite desire to abandon our "wicked" materialist lifestyles & technology to be just more
of that harkening back to an age which was never really golden.
We need to relearn to see the world in both detail and wholly, specific and general, subjective and objective.
The nature of human evolution and progression is such that we have no destination, but we're at risk of forgetting from whence we came, and then we may be well and truly lost.
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