Barefoot, Map As Territory and Zach Bush
June 29, 2025
8 min read
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Newsletter
{Body}
The architecture of bare feet
Your feet are engineering marvels containing 26 bones, 33 joints, and over 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments (this is more than a quarter of all the bones in your entire body!!) This intricate architecture exists for a reason: to provide a dynamic, adaptable foundation that can absorb impact, generate power, and maintain balance across any terrain.
The big toe plays a particularly crucial role in this system. In a healthy foot, your big toe should point straight ahead, aligned with the long axis of your foot, not angled inward toward your other toes. This alignment allows the big toe to function as your primary "push-off" point during walking and running, bearing up to 40% of your body weight during the propulsion phase of each step.
When shoes force your big toe into an unnatural inward position (hallux valgus), they disrupt this entire kinetic chain. Your foot loses its ability to generate proper propulsion, forcing other muscles up the chain — calves, hamstrings, glutes, and even your core — to compensate for this foundational dysfunction.
Your arch serves as a natural spring system, designed to store and release energy with each step. A healthy arch isn't rigidly high or completely flat — it's dynamic, capable of flattening slightly to absorb shock during impact, then springing back to propel you forward. This spring mechanism can only function properly when the intrinsic muscles of your foot are strong enough to control the arch's movement.
Modern shoes, particularly those with arch support, essentially put your foot in a cast. Or, as Vivo Barefoot puts it: “Modern shoes are robbing our feet of their natural potential. Thick soles restrict flexibility. Narrow toe boxes compromise movement. Shoe heels inhibit spring. And unnecessary cushioning weakens our feet. We’ve been constrained and conditioned. We’ve lost strength and sensation.”
Next week I’ll discuss a few more points about the feet — how to correctly stand and walk using what we know about biomechanics.
{Mind}
The map IS the territory
A king once made a demand so absurd it revealed the deepest delusion of the human mind. Wanting to know every detail of his land, he hired a cartographer to chart his territory. The cartographer returned with an elaborate map showing all major landmarks.
"Not detailed enough," declared the king. He hired five more cartographers to create a map 20 times larger with 20 times the resolution — complete with topographies, rivers, and individual buildings.
Still unsatisfied with the resulting map, he enlisted his entire citizenry. Loggers chopped trees for paper, miners extracted ore for ink, and townsfolk measured every rock, branch, and flower down to the micrometer.
The final result? A map the exact size of his kingdom.
But a map the size of the kingdom is no longer a map at all. You can't fold it, carry it, or use it to navigate because it covers everything you're trying to explore. The map has literally become the territory, thereby rendering itself completely useless.
You can laugh at the king's folly while missing its relevance: your mind does the same thing.
We assume that studying parenting books will teach how to be a good parent, researching meditation will bring meditative insight, and gathering insights about circumstances will reveal their meaning. But as the king discovered, following this logic to its conclusion means ending up with the thing itself, not merely the knowledge about it.
That is, reading millions of novels about will not encapsulate what it’s like to be in love. Decades of studying grief won't teach you what losing someone feels like. No amount of research on presence can replace actually being present.
Put differently, accumulating facts about something will never help you truly know it. Instead, just as the king's perfect map became indistinguishable from his actual kingdom, true Knowing is indistinguishable from direct experience. The internal map you're desperately trying to perfect — your analysis, your explanations, your frameworks for understanding life — is only complete when it's identical to life itself. At which point, why not skip the map entirely and just be in the territory?
So the next time you catch yourself trying to figure out what it all means, remember the king's folly: you're demanding a more detailed map of a space you're already standing in.
{Soul}
Do you love your child before or after you recognize their intrinsic innocence and worth? Do you appreciate the act of kindness before or after you realize its selflessness? Do you marvel at the landscape before or after you comprehend its significance?
The sequence matters. Love follows perception, not the reverse. It's the inevitable response to seeing clearly. When you truly perceive the beauty inherent in what stands before you, love arises spontaneously — without effort, without choice, without resistance.
With willingness, this beauty can be seen everywhere: in the bittersweet goodbye, in the heart-wrenching photos of children in Gaza, in the oceans drowning in plastic. All is intrinsically radiant and perfect by virtue of its Divine Origin, and — when you’re ready — can be seen as such.
June 22, 2025
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