Picture This: Loch Achtriochtan in Glencoe

Here at last, in the shadows of Glencoe where the Three Sisters and Aonach Dubh shoulder into the thundering heavens, mankind’s scrabble for dominion falters. The four of us are dying as we stand along the margins of Loch Achtriochtan, our selves sliding from the flesh into the embrace of the glen. The weather, as we call it, becomes a colossal Kundalini serpent twisting and writhing between the mountains. Rain pinwheels down on the skirling winds, and I huddle and shiver in my jacket. Each of us sifts through memories stranded here when youth more brightly tingled our bones.

Sheep stand around a small, white cottage beneath dark summits some might say glower with ill intent. Such ascriptions — all words etched, penned, or spoken — are moribund seedlings that fail to blossom into truths. The mountains need not speak for they possess no intent. Our own speech will not come, carried away, perhaps by the serpentine River Coe. The sky descends and with it new perception, the wisdom of Scotland’s west highlands. In this ages-old beauty, it is in surrender not subjugation that the disquiet of modernity is bestilled.

Listening to Bear McCreary – Dance of the Druids