Petra Söör
Photo: Felicity Crawshaw

Some months have passed since the Into The Mountain performances and with this we have invited the amazing team of women who made it happen to share their reflections, thoughts and feelings after the event. From production to performing, guiding audiences and behind the scenes, all have taken something away from the collective experience of Into The Mountain into their daily lives and practices. Performer and co-devisor, Petra Söör, shares her reflections and some photos below:

Something striking that remains for me is a sense of being gifted something really precious in so many ways… I think also starting with and following through in everything just also how sensitively the project was conceived, organised and managed by Simone and a wider group body of incredible people, very humbling and inspiring.
One thing that has come back is also the sense of being accompanied by the group and everyone feeling present with me at times even when I’ve been out walking in Sweden or elsewhere on my own, a very beautiful thing growing from the time spent together in Scotland and together in Into The Mountain..  I experienced a precious bareness and raw transparency whilst working out in the hills, the sense of immediacy, personal growth and discovery as well as a sense of a group body enabling something that would have been so differently experienced had we been out there all on our own.. Sharing being weathered, in awe, tired, hungry, curious, knowing not knowing, silence not silence, moving and conversing… a togetherness with a shared commitment and shared care taking, something amazing to be part of, gifting me so much to dwell in and also to walk onwards with.. Although the scale of the performances themselves is amazing they have also been some of the most intimate I’ve ever experienced, weather, sound and song, people, animals, plant life, movement, and all other elements forming part of place for moment. Being inside Into The Mountain as a piece of work was such a beautiful invitation to experience and enter a meeting with this place constantly changing on different time scales, proposing different states of attention, ways of being and every time revealing new things.
A copy of “The Living Mountain” keeps travelling with me with notes and bits of things sticking out of it marking different pages, and it feels like so much of this project is still living in my body in a way that it doesn’t quite feel as if its come to an end… And as Nan Shepherd writes in the last chapter called ‘Being’, “The thing to be known grows with the knowing”..
Photo: Petra Söör
Companionship
I walked the morning into day into evening
as the hills changed temperature
and forever my body
so this way the day seemed to beckon
Everything in its own time
trust me even if you need to go slow
I will not judge you
slow unravelling, fast
I hold time for both
companionship
in which solitude
can be, is
intimately accompanied by another
shared holding space for multiple unbecoming becoming
Unconditional care
unknown yet known
so tender and exquisite
peculiar
Yield
in this field of
convergence
inhabit this sharedness
come into relationship
with the fullness of love grief tiredness joy
the wanting and the nothing to be wanting
the desire to walk and the longing to retreat
touching all this coursing aliveness
beyond the mine and the yours
already happening
I wanted to tell you
Photo: Petra Söör
Photo: Petra Söör
Photo: Petra Söör
Photo: Petra Söör