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  • 🥾#29: The Salt Path by Raynor Winn - Book Summary & Key Takeaways

🥾#29: The Salt Path by Raynor Winn - Book Summary & Key Takeaways

What do you do when you've lost everything? When you have nowhere to turn?

Hello courageous people! 👋 Welcome to Edition 29.

This week, we are reading 📚 The Salt Path 🖋 by Raynor Winn.

It’s certainly a less intellectual or scientific based approach than many of the books I usually read for the newsletter, and in that makes a nice change. If you have been searching for a story of hope, transformation and an armchair adventure story, this could be a great book for you to read in full!

Reading this felt like a very long, warm hug.

So let’s jump in! All text in italics are quotes taken directly from the book.

📖 The Backstory

Ray and her husband Moth are a couple in their fifties, having been happily married for thirty-two years. They had spent their lives working towards creating their perfect existence:

“When we moved to the farm in Wales the sun was shining, the children were running around our feet and life was spreading out ahead of us. A derelict pile of stones in an isolated spot at the foot of the mountains. We put every ounce of ourselves into its restoration, working on it through every spare moment while the children grew around us.

It was our home, our business, our sanctuary.” - page 8

Unfortunately, it wasn’t destined to last.

Moth had a childhood friend Cooper, who he stayed in touch with into adulthood. Some years prior, Cooper offered Moth and Ray an investment opportunity into one of his companies, and they took it, putting in a large sum.

“The company with which the investment was made eventually failed, leaving a number of unpaid debts. The suggestion that we owed money had crept in insidiously. At first we ignored it, but over time Cooper became insistent that, owing to the structure of the agreement, we were liable to make payment towards those debts.” - page 8

Cooper went after them for money, softly at first and then fiercely by the end. It drained their savings, eventually leaving them unable to pay for legal representation.

They fought the court case for an agonising three years, until they finally came up with the answer. The piece of paper that would absolve them of all responsibility and send them on their way.

Only, without legal representation they submitted the paperwork the wrong way. The court ruled in Cooper’s favour and they lost everything.

Their house—and along with it their farm and their income—would be seized less than a week later.

“What I didn’t know, what I couldn’t know, was that it wouldn’t take five days for my life to change forever, for everything that kept me stable to turn to quicksand beneath me. It would happen the next day.” - page 13

Moth had been struggling with shoulder pain for years. And then he started to get numbness in his face and a tremor in his hand. Six years in total the symptoms had been going on and they had been trying to get answers.

And they finally got their answer: Corticobasal Degeneration or CBD. The doctor said the prognosis was usually six to eight years after onset. Considering how long Moth’s symptoms had been around for, this was very bad news.

“The doctor looked at me as if I was a child; then he carried on trying to explain a rare degenerative brain disease that would take the beautiful man I’d loved since I was a teenager and destroy his body and then his mind as he fell into confusion and dementia, and end with him unable to swallow and probably choking to death on his own saliva. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing they could do about it.” - page 15

Homeless. Penniless. Terminally ill.

That is an absolute doozey of a combination and begs the question of what on earth do you do when absolutely everything—and I mean everything—is stacked against you?

🏕 The Homeless Hikers

“We could just walk.’

It was a ridiculous thing to say, but I said it anyway.

‘Walk?’

‘Yeah, just walk.’

Could Moth walk it? It was just a coastal path after all; it couldn’t be that hard and we could walk slowly, put one foot in front of the other and just follow the map.”

- page 5

Naturally (🤯🤪😳) Moth and Ray decided to hike the South West Coast Path; a 630 mile / 1014km trail around Cornwall and Devon in the United Kingdom, wild camping the entire way.

In so many ways, this is a completely batshit crazy thing to decide to do. But the more you think about their circumstances and the choices they had available to them at the time, it actually makes so much sense.

Especially after reading Lost Connections recently, (still probably ranking as my favourite book from the past month or two! You can read part 1 here and part 2 here) hiking the South West Coast Path would have given them some semblance of control where they could have ended up having absolutely none. A courageous choice that ended up paying dividends.

Their lives became simple.

Hike, look for a place to sleep, camp, wake up, have tea, hike, repeat.

“I stirred the tea with the odd realization that I had no work to concern myself about, no domestic problems to resolve; I had no problems at all really. Other than that we were homeless and Moth was dying.” - page 51

I won’t give away too many spoilers, but their sense of independence and their strength (both physical and mental) continued to build throughout the journey:

“We could have stopped, but we had nothing to lose and everything to walk for. We were free here, battered by the elements, hungry, tired, cold, but free. Free to walk on or not, to stop or not. Not camping out with friends or family, being a burden, becoming an irritation, wearing friendship away to just tolerance.

Here we were still in control of our life, of our own outcomes, our own destiny.” - page 171

And somehow, through it all they managed to not fall apart. Reading this story, I am at a loss for how they didn’t lose themselves completely and fall in a heap, to never get up again.

This isn’t the kind of book that gives prescriptions or advice to us for our own lives, but still there is so much we can learn and take inspiration from. Here are the top lessons and takeaways as I see them:

🌳 Lesson #1: The Healing Power of Nature

If we can’t afford therapy or other support (or even if we can), go towards nature. It has the power to recalibrate us, settle us, soothe us like nothing else in this world.

“It’s touched you, it’s written all over you: you’ve felt the hand of nature. It won’t ever leave you now; you’re salted.” - page 162

🥺 Lesson #2: We need to get better at holding space for each other while we are in pain

“So how come you’ve got so much time? I wish I had that much.’

‘We’re homeless. We lost our home and we’ve nowhere to go, so just walking seemed a good idea.’

It came out of my mouth without a thought. The truth. But as the man reached out and pulled his child towards him and the wife winced and looked away, I knew I wouldn’t be saying it again. He called for the bill and was gone in moments.” - page 47

This conversation happened towards the beginning of their journey, and they instantly knew that it was a huge mistake by the reaction. It would be months before they admitted the truth aloud to other human beings again, almost in jest once they got past caring what people thought of them.

In between, they created a story that they had “sold their house” to go and walk the Coast Path - a much more palatable, manageable version to keep others comfortable.

I think we have all done some version of this - told only a portion of the truth to keep others comfortable when what we actually need is to be held in our pain.

👨‍⚕️ Lesson #3: Health Professionals aren’t always right

(This one is a little more abstract, but stick with me)

When Moth got his diagnosis, he was told in no uncertain terms “don’t walk too far, don’t lift heavy things and don’t do a lot of stairs” - and of course proceeds to do the exact opposite.

And do you know what happened? He got SO much better.

Of course, I’m not saying that we’ll always get better by doing the opposite of what health professionals tell us, but they definitely don’t get it right all the time (and I should know with a career history including ten years as a physiotherapist).

This goes for doctors, psychologists, specialists, the lot of them.

Sometimes the best things we can do is test and try things for ourselves to see what works.

Like I said at the start, this book was quite different to a lot of the books I usually read for the newsletter and the lessons and takeaways perhaps a little less direct.

Nevertheless, I hope you got some value from this edition and I really do recommend this book as an enthralling and inspirational read.

Until next week my friends,Eleanor ❤️🙏

🧠 Resources & Links

📸 Follow Raynor Winn on Instagram - 25.3k followers

🐥 Follow Raynor Winn on Twitter - 13.7k followers

📕 Next week’s book

Coming out next Friday 19th August 2022 is #30:📚 Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out Of Depression🖋 by James S. Gordon MD

“Despite the billions spent on prescription anti-depressant drugs and psychotherapy, people everywhere continue to grapple with depression. James Gordon, one of the nation's most respected psychiatrists, now offers a practical and effective way to get unstuck.

Drawing on forty years of pioneering work, Unstuck is Gordon's seven-stage program for relief through food and nutritional supplements; Chinese medicine; movement, exercise, and dance; psychotherapy, meditation, and guided imagery; and spiritual practice. The result is a remarkable guide that puts the power to change in the hands of those ready to say "no" to suffering and drugs and "yes" to hope and happiness.”

[Note: I’m a little alarmed by the last line of the blurb that mentions saying “no” to drugs, but I am interested to see what he has to say on the topic!]