Finding kindred

A new year is upon us, after a year of hibernation, self-protection, loss, gain, and growth. Now it is time for new adventures and finding kindred souls who are walking - or who have walked - the planet.

This year, as I prepare to step onto the soil of Scotland for the first time and commune with my ancestors, I have already found connections to the "homeland" that make me feel I will belong there. 

One of the first things I do, of course, when visiting some place new, is search out the artists and writers. Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Walter Scott come to mind immediately, but then I found Nan Shepard. Ah, there's the like...

She walked the highlands, and made poetic observations on them, showing an intense connection to the land. 

"Shepard's first novel, The Quarry Wood, was published in 1928, with two more following in the 1930s. All three are set in the North-East with the country communities and harsh landscape as background. Her book The Living Mountain, a work of poetic prose exploring her close relationship with the hills, was written in the 1940s, though not published until 1977. Hill-walking was Shepard's great love; her single collection of poetry In the Cairngorms (1934) expresses an intensity of deep kinship with nature. They are poems written with the perception of one who has climbed the mountains and truly knows them."

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/nan-shepherd

So without sediment

Run the clear burns of my country,
Fiercely pure,
Transparent as light
Gathered into its own unity,
Lucent and without colour:
Or gree,
Like clear deeps of air,
Light massed upon itself,
Like the green pinions,
Cleaving the trouble of approaching night,
Shining in their own lucency...

I cannot wait to know this world myself. My upcoming journey is made to a writing retreat within the walls of a castle, to live bohemian for a glorious week. My goal is a book of poems and artwork to complete upon my return, if my ballad-singing ancestors will wake within me there. I call upon them like the willo-the-wisps I've already loved, since the first days of foxfire and fireflies on the farm.

That's kindred, after all.