Hello and welcome to Under the Skin from Luminary. This week I spoke with Robert McFarlane.

Robert is a writer and fellow of a manual college Cambridge. He is known for his books on landscape, nature,

place, people and language. He is the author of Underland and mountains of the mind.

Robert is beautiful. If you'd like to listen to the rest of this podcast and all of my weekly

under the skin podcast, we have to do subscribe to Lumery on Apple Podcasts or download the Lumery app.

Also I have a brand new meditation podcast called Above the Noise out now. In this part of the

podcast we've Robert, we talk about what it's like to go down beneath. The obvious analogies

between subterranean spaces and the unconscious mind, re-burthing through a uterine tunnel.

We talk about sacredness, miracles, rationalism and individualism. The limitations thereof,

it's absolutely fantastic. If you want to listen to more of it, go over to Luminary.

Trying to achieve a quality with the annihilation of category is not successful. That's exactly right.

We're in this era where it turns out we were never the boss.

Just a little pack of night. What's beneath the surface of people with

the idea of the idea is that to find our time, the history, we are told.

Welcome to Russell Brand. Under this game.

I suppose what I'm interested in now is how come you went from mountaineering and that

kind of what made you, why specifically the underworld, what drew you to that?

Yeah. Well, I think I look back at it and this is retrofitting, I guess, but it had a

gravitational logic. I just kept heading downwards. I started on the mountains and then

ended up writing a book called The Wild Places, which was more about Moors and Forests and Islands.

Then a wrote book called The Old Ways, which was about tracks and paths, which are the

beginnings of the underworld in a way, because they're kind of beaten down into the land a little

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