Ascent is life: Starting Over

The week after Hardrock has been a rough one. The first two days I felt great. A little bit spacey, but still riding the high. Then I crashed. I'm still getting out for short daily runs, but I'm tired and a bit depressed. The funny thing is I know full well this will happen after such an intensly great experience. There seems to be no stopping it, so I just let it happen and make sure I think through things before acting so as not to take it out on anyone else. I know it will pass. I know it will happen after my next big adventure.
   I wrote the preceding paragraph weeks ago, intending to elaborate on my "new direction" post Hardrock. Then I ran a local little fourteen mile race and my right knee has not been the same since. The humor is not lost on me that I came away from one of the toughest hundred milers around just fine, but trying to run fourteen (too) fast got me injured. Speed kills! So I watched August slip away with no big mountain days, no sick, multi-summit link ups of my dreams. Just a couple mellow backpack trips with MK and the dogs, and a couple easy thirteener summits. I'm not trying to say these are bad, just that I have this amazing base of conditioning, and a whole new concept of what's possible in a day, but whenever I try to run downhill, the knee says "not yet". The peaks of my beloved San Juans are tempting me so much, and summer is so short. I'm trying to learn from this. My asana practice is re-invigorated, which I believe is accelerating the healing, and I've completed a couple domestic projects that have been waiting for some down time. I have not posted anything here because...well I didn't have much of anything good to say. I try to keep it positive here in the blogospere, because me being grouchy doesn't help anyone.
   So where to from here? I guess I slowly heal up and see if September offers some nice weather for the high country. Like Jerry used to sing, "You gotta make it somehow, on the dreams you still believe." One of the few I still believe in is that nature will prevail. It seems to take strong doses of wildness to counteract the soul numbing hours spent in civilization. Every time I go out there is a short time where I have to burn off the nasty residue of the modern world before I can see clearly again. Here are a couple quotes that say better than I can:
"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, as vital to our lives as water and good bread. (hey, this was before the gluten thing!) A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from it's origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself." - Ed Abbey
   "There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die."
- Hunter S. Thompson
   I know, I said I'd try to keep it positive. How about some photos of cute animals then?