The Salt Path wasn’t just a journey — it was a quantum leap

How light, movement, and wildness became Moth’s medicine

Jun 30, 2025

Some books stay with you forever. The Salt Path was one of those for me — one of the most arresting, unforgettable reads of my life. If you asked my family, they’d say I got a little too obsessed—but hey, at least Raynor and Moth pulled me out of my Elizabeth Holmes Bad Blood phase. Who doesn’t love a good biotech scandal with fake baritone voices, black turtlenecks and blood tests that lied more than she did? Anyway, after watching the film of the Salt Path recently, my obsession deepened. Something about it kept echoing in my body: this wasn’t just a beautiful story, this was healing in motion, and was it the light that was doing the healing?

Raynor and Moth’s story is one of profound loss. Within a matter of weeks, they lost their home, their land, their security and their future — and then, Moth was diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare, neurodegenerative disease that affects motor control, memory and speech. It has no known cure. They were in their fifties, broke, broken and facing terminal illness.

So they decided to walk…

With no home and nowhere to go, they shouldered rucksacks and headed out on the South West Coast Path — 630 miles of unforgiving cliffs, relentless wind, and salt-soaked wilderness. The Coast Path includes the elevation equivalent of climbing Mount Everest almost four times. Moth’s consultant had recommended gentle strolls and avoiding stairs. Yet against all odds, they embraced the decision to attempt a journey that even the young and able might see as an outrageous challenge.

Light in the breakdown

At first Moth really struggled, sometimes unable to even sit up after the previous days long and demanding walk. However, then something unexpected started to happen.
“As we continued though, Moth improved,” Raynor writes. “Getting out of the tent in the morning became easier. He had less stiffness and pain.”

There’s a particularly powerful moment portrayed in both the book and film, where they run from the incoming tide — and Moth, who was told he would eventually be immobile, runs, carrying the tent above his head. It feels like a quietly radical moment, while Raynor watches in disbelief.

“In that moment, I realised how far he’d come. Doctors had told us that he eventually wouldn’t be able to move.”

Since then, Raynor has gone deeper into the research: nature exposure and endurance activity, and how these factors may have altered the trajectory of Moth’s disease. And yes, this all matters. However, I suspect it’s due, from a systems biology and quantum neurobiology perspective, to a restoration of cellular coherence.

The Salt Path wasn’t just a journey — it was a signal correction

In the quantum view of the brain, neurodegeneration isn’t just about rogue proteins or tangled plaques—it’s a collapse in communication. A loss of coherence. Moth’s brain, like others affected by CBD, was likely struggling not just with tau tangles (an abnormal accumulation of protein inside nerve cells often associated with neurodegenerative diseases), but the clogging up of microtubules and with a deeper issue: the failure of the light-based signaling system that underpinned all of his cellular function. Microtubules are more than structural supports; they’re intracellular highways for transporting nutrients, neurotransmitters and light itself. When tau becomes hyperphosphorylated it detaches and clumps, blocking these highways and scrambling neuronal messages.

But there’s more to it than plumbing problems. The mitochondria in Moth’s neurons, tiny bio-photonic engines, were likely emitting weaker, fuzzier ultra-weak photon emissions (UPEs), the subtle light pulses through which cells communicate. According to neurosurgeon Dr. Jack Kruse, a breakdown in this mitochondrial photonic fidelity lies at the root of many modern diseases. Through his lens, neurodegeneration becomes not just a physical breakdown, but an energetic one.

Mitochondria don’t just make energy, they’re quantum sensors. They read light, time, temperature, and movement. And Moth’s new life — raw, wild, uncomfortable — gave those mitochondria everything they needed to recalibrate.

The wild prescription doctors would never write

Every day Moth was out in nature, not just for a stroll with dog or for a walk to the shops, but all day long with no artificial light in-between. Rising with the sun and resting with its fall, his body began to synchronise with its circadian rhythm and restore redox balance and hormonal rhythm.

Each step stirred the flow of lymph and cerebrospinal fluid, clearing waste and re-establishing microtubule signalling. Salt-kissed breezes eased inflammation and the absence of blue-lit screens and the presence of full-spectrum daylight allowed melatonin—nature’s antioxidant janitor, to work again, sweeping away oxidative debris. In that wild, sunlit landscape, he wasn’t just walking, he was recharging the light-language of his body, restoring coherence at the deepest levels.

A new framework for neuro-degeneration

If we begin to see CBD not just as a disease, but as Kruse would say, in part as a collapse in mitochondrial photonic fidelity, then it is possible that what Moth experienced was not surprising. It was exactly what his system needed to self-repair.

Light is the language.
Movement is the mechanism.
Stillness in the wild is regenerative.

His body was starting to heal by returning to the inputs it was built on:

Light, dark, salt, silence, stillness, motion, discomfort, and time.

The body remembers.

Raynor and Moth didn’t defy medicine — they walked back into the field that built it

This is not about being anti-medicine, it’s about pre-medicine. The field of biology is built on light - on photons and coherence. Moth’s experience shows us what can happen when we reintroduce those ancient inputs — even after all seems lost.

Doctors wouldn’t recommend this, but the evidence of this extraordinary journey suggests, maybe they should?

My final thoughts, because they simply can’t go unspoken, are about the extraordinary love shared between Raynor and Moth. It was the kind of love that’s rare and real, the kind that defies circumstance. Time and again, it moved me to tears while watching their story unfold on film. Why is this important for Moth’s healing? I think we all know the answer deep down. Because love - pure, unwavering, altruistic love, has a kind of coherence, a quiet order, that’s not just emotional but also deeply biological.

Another nod to Dr Kruse’s wisdom and deep understanding of how physics runs the biological show, is his explanation of how the strength of our relationships relies on our redox potential and our cellular charge. Therefore, if one person’s life-force begins to fade, the other may lose interest and the relationship can falter. But in Raynor and Moth’s case, their redox stayed strong together. What does that mean in human terms? Think of redox as the battery life of your cells. When love flows freely, without fear or condition, it’s as if those batteries stay charged. Their bond kept that charge alive, even as a catalogue of mistakes denuded them of all their material goods, financial safety and security, and while Moth’s body was under the sort of prolonged attack not seen since the siege of Troy. The connection between them became a kind of internal power grid, quiet, unseen and fiercely alive.

What we witnessed on that path was a man with a rare neurodegenerative condition, no home, no money and eventually no medication—yet surrounded by the most powerful inputs we too often forget: love, movement, fresh air, natural light—and the absence of modern interferences like fluorescent bulbs and electromagnetic fog. In the simplicity of the wild he became harmonised with light and love. He was a quiet whisper of what might be possible when we step out of discordance or disconnection and let the body and spirit realign.

Later this week on the Substack, we’ll step into the sunlight—literally—and start to unravel some of the big misunderstandings around UV light. We’ll explore why the story of skin damage is only one frame of the picture, and how sunlight, when viewed through the lens of systems biology, may be one of the most underappreciated inputs for health and longevity. Expect nuance, some myth-busting, and a lot of light.