Great Glen Way - Day 5 of 6 - part 2

April 18, Tuesday. Invermoriston to Drumnadrochit, continued from part 1. 

At one of the first high points with a big view there was a fun sculpture - I hope this collage gives you a sense of it. I really enjoyed being up there and looking through it. I liked the names they gave it too. “Eye in the sky” and “view catcher.”

Today as you may have noticed was a sunny day. Brilliant blue sky. The temperature got up to 60 so warm that I actually found myself complaining about the sun during the last part of the walk which was a road walk on a hard surface with no shade. I live that i have experienced such a variety in the weather. 

I forgot to tell you in the day before yesterday’s blog about a charming young man I ate supper with at the hostel. He was cycling and as we talked I learned that he had been a pilot/engineer for the RAF - fulfilling a childhood dream of flying a plane. He talked with great animation and passion about weather. He said lots of the pilot trainees just learned it to pass the test but he lived learning about weather and it had continued to be useful to him. He understood how storms moved. It came up when I spoke about Scottish weather being very similar to what we have at home on Orcas except it seems to me that here in Scotland it changes more rapidly. He spoke (I didn’t fully understand but I loved watching his enthusiasm while he talked about it) about Scotland bring between two large weather systems, one I think from the Atlantic Ocean and one from the European continent, and sometimes one, sometimes the other determines the weather and their interaction makes it very variable. He also talked about navigation with enthusiasm - how they all had to learn to navigate without gps in case their systems weren’t working. I had mentioned to him that my father taught navigation in the navy in World War II, and how it was based on the stars and then geometric calculations. No gos then. I was struck by how much I enjoyed his enthusiasm, after a day of being too exhausted to enjoy the beauty of the land around me. And I realized that sometimes I respond to the magic of the human beauty more easily than that if nature. And I’m not sure I realized that about myself. I told him about my directional dyslexia - how on the trail I could get up after lunch and walk the wrong way, thst my instinctive sense of direction is wrong about 90% of the time. He said his wife was the same and I said it did seem to me that men in general were more gifted at navigation than women in general. (To make one of those politically incorrect gender-alisations. ) he said it made sense since most of our evolution took place prior to and during the Stone Age when men went out hunting and had to find their way home. I agreed - and that women had to be able to navigate the emotions in an infant who had no words. He smiled and said that he had a lot of difficulty with emotional navigation. 

I had a fun interaction with the two women from France - a mother and daughter - with whom I shared my bunk. And there was a third interaction. Mostly I was impressed that on a day when I was too tired to be attuned to the beauty of the natural world, the beauty of human faces and voices and gestures - and the love of life they conveyed - seemed to energize me. This contradicts my self-image as an introvert who gets energy from solitude and is depleted by human interaction. Interesting to note. 

I did not actually meet the Loch Ness monster - in fact I only rarely had views of Loch Ness - but I did meditate on how whisky was both muse and monster for Bobby Burns. I do think that a major learning from psychoanalysis was that all my relationships at least important ones involve conflicting, opposing emotions. So for me poetry was both muse and monster, as was therapy, sexuality - most anything and anyone that stirred string emotion in me. 

I also thought about the fact that I learned in psychoanalysis that all parts of me could be welcomed and accepted. I’ve been thinking that maybe what a psychoanalytic pilgrimage is about is me taking the analyst stance to the world. As if I were saying to the world: “Just say whatever comes into your mind, don’t censor anything.” And as a pilgrim-psychoanalyst I practice just holding things as they are. That includes the weather, the cut down trees, the different sorts of people I meet on the way. It also includes my own states - like today, a bit tired again, not fully responsive to the world around me. I thought of Bobby Burns writing about catching moments as they fly, and about his metaphor for happiness as a shy young woman who withdraws when she is pursued. How different his poetic wisdom from the whole “positive thinking” and cognitive therapy so prevalent in the US.  (Which had mostly not been a good fit for me). 

I need to get to bed. Tomorrow is a long walk - 20 miles and a lot of it unfortunately on what they call “tarmac” here. Hard surface much harder in the feet - so I want a very early stop and lots of rest stops to elevate my feet, massage them, rest them. 

Too bad. I have more photos and stories I wanted to share. For example these two trees one dead one alive that seemed to grow from a single root system. Made me think of the muse and the monster duality. 

I really liked this photo for the feeling of the curve in the trail and how it connects with the curves in the landscape the excitement of coming around a corner and seeing something new or glimpsing the loch again after not being able to see it. 

That will do. Enough for now. We want to make it through tomorrows walk. I had a glass of Prosecco with my dinner tonight to celebrate completing the Great Glen Way. I figure i May be too tired to celebrate tomorrow. So let’s get a good night’s sleep and hope we can take good care of our feet and catch some of those moments of happiness as they fly by. I plan to start at 5:15am tomorrow - my first early start since the big chill. Thanks as always for walking with me, see you tomorrow on the way to Inverness. (Did I remember to tell you that Inver means where waters meet?) We’ll be walking along the River Ness part of tomorrow, I think.