A Summary of Why Nature is Remedy

The runner becomes ever more certain that truth cannot be found in a town - too many distorted contradictory shrill messages competing for attention. Now nature. That's different. Nature has but one voice, the unwarped primal world before culture, the world as the world truly is, full of grace. Contradiction? Of what? Go there. Could be that undisturbed swale at the bottom of the hill. Get alone. Get where you only see undisturbed nature. Hang out. Go out again (as John Muir would say, 'going out is going in') and start noticing that nature is looking back at you. You witness nature and nature witnesses you. Come back again to find that nature is on your side. Discover you have a new friend that eternally wants you to win. Start to notice that the flip side of nature's beauty is truth. The greater the beauty the greater the understanding of why nature is truth. Now, take the truth in the hills down into the town. Do this enough and when it comes to pushing back the absolutism, you will have become something you were not before ... Useful!
 
Running puts this teaching on steroids, starting with the addition of a Ridgeland muse insistence on going as fast as you can all of the time, like an explorer out to discover that razor thin line between how fast s/he can run down this mountain and the fall. As for the uphill, the greater you push the more stress on your body, discomfort as a basis for redemption. Coercion, exertion, redemption, perfection. Every step and breadth a prayer, learning how to love the pant. The pages that follow are but commentary.
All this material is born out of a rapport of a downhill runner with the Marin Headlands that stretch from the Golden Gate Bridge to the northern shoulder of Mt Tam, towering some 2,700 feet out of the sea, plunging down to this runner's Mill Valley bedroom window. Arriving so often at places never visited by humans since before time, he could not help being noticed by a pesky ridgeland muse. One day while descending down a very steep ravine, the muse just jumped on board and has not let go since. The faster the runner goes, the harder the muse grabs on, making his running a meditation and his life a blessing. For years, the runner packed post-it-notes and when transferring his latest along-the-way scribbling to his journal, most times they proved useless drivel, and sometimes not. Even then, the runner did not do the writing, only the typing.
Who is Ridgeland Muse?
The one who is having its way with the frequent runner.
Is it a talent in the runner, there all the time, triggered by wilderness beauty? Fughedabadat!
No. This muse is an agent of the absolute, universally combined consciousness of everyone/everything that exists right now, waiting to pounce on the next passerby ready to receive its message …
See? Existence is not only gorgeous,
It’s on your side.