Miranda Whall

1.00am

Robert McFarlane says in his introduction to the Living Mountain that Shepherds book is a ‘hymn to living all the way through; to touching, tasting, smelling and hearing the world’. He says if you manage to live all the way through, then you might walk ‘out of the body and into the mountain’ such that you become, briefly ‘a stone…the soil of the earth’ And at that point then, well, then one has been in and that is ‘all’ and that ‘that all should be heard not diminutively, apologetically, but expansively, vastly’. At 1.00 in the morning I was definitely ‘in’, I felt a little weird, trippy, raw and a bit wild. I felt abandoned, fragmented and belligerent, determined to find a way through and on by whatever means I could, I both yielded and pushed into the resistance that I met at every hand and knee step, I was bodily. Hannah and I were connected, in the dark, but silent, I could hear her stumbling around me, she was following me and my camera lights and head torch. I was led by my cameras, my consciousness transported to each camera, imagining what they were seeing.