barefoot summer

Yesterday someone said they’d been encouraged to sit – it could be meditation – in their bare feet for five minutes. To come in closer contact with the Earth, kind of regardless of the medium on which the bare feet rested. She said she was going to try it.

Being more and more open to offers from any day I’m given, I also decided to sit barefoot, so when the tweeting alarm sounded early I crawled out of bed, and after a few minutes I bowed to my meditation chair and then sat for 38 minutes – in bare feet. There’s a rug on the floor of the room I rent, and I noticed I felt shorter, or the room felt deeper, me missing on socks and beat-up old first-thing-in-a-day running shoes. Perhaps I leaned forward just a bit to compensate, possibly sitting even taller in the process, so, feeling smaller was actually becoming taller. Every once in a while, excusing myself from the breath, I became aware of my feet – toes and soles and heals, a four-cornered thing, on the ground – in this case a rug, along the way it may have been tar, concrete, sand, dirt, linoleum – any place where feet can land. I’ll just say it was interesting.

I’ve learned a new yoga pose recently called “Tadasana”, which is the mountain pose, being mountain-like vertically (and spread out) on the earth. The feet hold up the mountain. The suggestion is to feel the four corners of the feet, and I’ve been able to do that. Always barefoot. I became “Tadasana” after the meditation.

When I was a kid I was barefoot a lot. Some of it was growing up in Wareham, Massachusetts, where it was and is nearly impossible to walk 500 yards in any direction without coming upon another beach. But, it wasn’t being barefoot just at the beach. No, barefoot in the yard and barefoot on the grass and the sidewalk and out in the street and for sure in the house, in my room, and bare feet up on the couch, watching the Red Sox. Watching ‘Ozzie and Harriet.’ Watching ‘Outer Limits.’ I think I was braver then, riskier, and summer feet became like reptile feet, strong and tough and ever so confidant.

Somewhere earlier this morning I made a decision to try for much more of a barefoot life as summer comes strolling back into southern California in a couple months. When I’m hopefully moving through gifted days “Tadasana-like.” Without socks and shoes. And with someone special.