Going Barefoot as a Spiritual Practice

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earth healing

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

If you ever had the chance to enter my closet, you would realize two things about me: I love shoes and I might have a shoe addiction problem. I have more shoes and cowboy boots than all my friends combined; and I have a lot of friends. But after returning from two weeks in Costa Rica I have decided to spend most of the summer barefoot.

I learned that Costa Rica is at the top of the world, the lone contender from the Americas in environmental performance distinguished in March this year for it’s environmental sustainability by the United Nations. Costa Rica’s relationship with Mother Earth is both remarkable and respectful and I found myself wanting to connect to Her in the same way. So I took my shoes off. And I kept them off. Aside from when I was at the beach or my backyard, I can’t remember when I last spent one day barefoot, much less several.

What I experienced from walking around without shoes was profound. Being barefoot creates presence. Mind chatter dissipates. The animals seemed to be less suspicious. I noticed sounds, smells and saw more detail as I slowly walked. And I discovered the earth is soft, so soft in fact that it deeply moved me. The temperature of the dirt changed step after step depending on the tree cover over me and the leaf litter under me. The moisture, the rocks, the shade, the direction of the wind. It all mattered. With each step I felt met by Mother Earth. Supported. Held up. And something I never expected, I felt better. I noticed improved circulation in my feet and ankles. My neck and shoulders lost all the tension they seem to always have. I had better posture and better balance. It’s amazing to me how wearing shoes has separated me from so much of what I am a part of.

When I returned home I continued my barefoot practice. It’s simple, convenient, and heart opening. It’s a mindfulness spiritual practice that uses our feet as connective soul bridges between body, mind and planet Earth. It raises our consciousness and raising consciousness in urban life is critical to sustaining the planet.

Our shoes distort our bodies’ feeling and function and also disconnect us from the earth. We don’t think about this, working in our offices behind non-opening windows, perched high above the earth on steel encased in concrete. We sleep and move in climate controlled homes and vehicles where we have to look at an instrument to know the temperature outside. Our lifestyle is more like life in submarine or spaceship than on Mother Nature, it seems. Conversely, there’s something primal, damp, sensual and connective about walking on the earth. Something of mystery. This is the thing I love about it: it redirects my abstract concerns. It plugs my attention into something much greater and more live-giving than the ridiculous flock of worries my mind generates.

We’re at a real crossroads now with Mother Earth, and need to change our relationship to Her. Recycling newspapers and buying hybrid cars isn’t going to do it because the mindset behind these well-intended changes still treats the planet as a commodity, a sort of gravel pit of resources for humans to plunder. We don’t need different ways to pillage the planet. We need different humans. A more evolved humanity that sees the ecological and spiritual implications of living as creatures in a much greater web of life all around us.

I’m not ready to kick my cowboy boots and Manolo Blahnik’s to the curb, but I do plan on spending most of the summer connecting to the earth’s chi by going barefoot.

When was the last time your bare feet hit the ground?

Thor – A Gentle Father

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He has the kind of face that stops you in your tracks and the first time I saw the Colonel I thought the Norse God Thor was visiting from Asgard. He is a head higher than most people I would consider tall. His blonde hair, which is cut barely a few millimeters in length, frames an almost perfectly symmetrical face. He has distinct cheekbones and his angular jaw look as if it is molded from granite. His eyes are a vivid blue but sometimes they look as if a great body of water has softly melted into milky green hue, the perfect match for his army fatigues. If you get close enough you can see flecks of silver in his eyes. He appears to be in his mid-forties and everything about his body screams discipline.

But as handsome as he is, I always had a sense that his beauty was more than skin deep. Since he had been frequently deployed I didn’t run into him often, but the few times that I did I felt something odd, unusual, unexpected. Also there is an undercurrent of gentleness that seems out of place in his warrior body.

Right before Christmas I heard of his wife’s sudden death. I simply stood shaking my head in disbelief. Their daughter and my son are in the same class at school and just the week before, I sat with his wife, on a bench waiting for the last school bell to ring. I still feel a chill move through my body when I think of it. I didn’t know her well, yet I felt the impact deeply.

I now run into the Colonel in the school parking lot, in class meetings, at a band concerts, and at birthday parties. Wherever his daughter is, he is there too. I am on the outskirts of their lives watching as they travel through their grief. I know first hand that grief never ends, but it changes. It’s a passage not a place to stay; it’s not a sign of weakness, nor a lack of faith. Grief is the price of love. I’ve learned it’s not the weight of grief that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it; and the Colonel carries his grief like Thor carries the weight of his hammer, with gentle dignity and grace. In doing so he doesn’t tell his daughter how to live – he shows her. Every day. Hard things shatter into a million pieces yet soft things don’t break. His greatest strength is his gentleness.

My grandmother used to tell me of the ancient Irish who had a mythic sense of how to weave the world back into fullness when the center failed to hold and all seemed to fall apart and be doomed into darkness. When disorientation became the common shape of life and the four directions seemed about to be blown to the wind, then the unifying fifth direction would have to be sought. This calming gentleness could only be found at the edges of the land in the darkest places and along the misty cliffs where the otherworld plays hide and seek with those of us on earth.

If people are willing to go to that place that seems darkest to them, each will find something of meaning and value. For as the darkness feels closer, the threads of existence move near as well. In facing the darkness one finds again the enlivening thread of gentle hope. If each then turns back again and pulls the thread of life toward the middle of things, then each automatically contributes to regenerating the unified center.

What the Colonel reminds me is that life is not always so certain; even straight roads have subtle curves in them. Perhaps the best thing one – anyone – can do is to listen more carefully to those hidden voices speaking from places beyond time and matter; places buried in the middle of the earth and the center, untouchable and gentle part of the soul.

(Please note: I’m not saying the Colonel is Thor, but come to think about it, I have never seen them in the same room together.)

To All The Broken Hearted

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All the genuinely smart, talented, funny friends I know seem to be broken-hearted. You will notice it on Twitter more than Facebook, because Facebook is where you go to do your performance art. It’s where you pretend to be hip; the place where people have ridiculously perfect relationships; the obligatory trips to the moon and where all toddlers potty train themselves. It’s the place where you hide how really bat shit crazy you really are. Facebook is surface; Twitter is subtext, and judging by what I am seeing lately, there are a lot of people experiencing bone aching sadness.

I have attempted to find a common denominator for all these broken-hearted souls and the answers were varied. Anything from; she had a mole on her eyelid; he pronounced it “cold slaw,” and Venus is retrograde. All the excuses you can imagine and some you can’t. But no one has said, “I am three gallons of crazy in a two gallon bucket and no one can put up with a mess like me.”

I don’t have the answers. I don’t know some big truth that I can reveal to everyone. All I can do is hurt, and try to stop hurting, and try to help others stop hurting. Maybe we need to tribe up, find each other and put our arms around each other and say something like: I know you have lost someone and it hurts. Perhaps you began to lose pieces of them until one day, they had disappeared. I’m not going to tell you tomorrow is another day, the sun will go on shining, or there are plenty of fish in the sea. It is ok to hurt, and it won’t be better for a long, long time, but eventually it will. For now take all the time you need. Here is some chocolate.

And most of us have figured out that we have to do what’s in front of us and keep doing it. Go to work, return calls, answer emails, return library books, go to the store. And breathe. And some of us even pray. The horror felt is real, and so you do your laundry and you make it through another day. In the aftermath of a loss we do what we’ve always done, although we are changed. Perhaps that’s the point. People change for two reasons I think: their minds are open or their hearts have been broken.

I know it’s hard to believe people when they say, “I know how you feel”. But I actually know how you feel. I understand feeling as insignificant as humanly possible. And how it can actually ache in places you didn’t know you had inside you. And it doesn’t matter how many new haircuts you get, or gyms you join, or how many glasses of Malbec you drink with your girlfriends, you still go to bed every night going over every detail and wonder what you did wrong or how you could have misunderstood. And how in the hell for that brief moment you could think that you were that happy. And sometimes you can even convince yourself that he’ll see the light and show up at your door. And after all that, however long all that may be, you’ll discover that little pieces of your soul will finally come back. And you will realize where there is potential for love the heart keeps on going. It will love whom it loves even if you don’t want it to, even after relationships end. It will keep loving after that too.

“And you finally realize with all the bad stuff there always comes good. If our lives are like clay cups then pain carves the cup deeper as we endure more sorrow but only to make it hold more joy as we drink from the well that of the love that surrounds us everyday.”
J. August Luhrs

Love Bats Last

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Love stories are as rare as a cold bottle of Dr. Pepper in Europe, even though Hollywood and its misguided unrealistic version of love would hope that we believe otherwise. I only know of two relationships that have gone the distance. My parents, who will celebrate 60 years this month and my friends Charles and Arne, who, against all odds, and for decades most of society, are celebrating 36 years together.

They met at a party in Manhattan, and through the smoke and over the mullets, they were taken with each other right from the start. One enchanted evening. Their own private cliché. They bought a loft in Tribeca in the late 1970’s, which then was the kind of place where drug deals on the corners were a common occurrence and there were just as many rats as people walking around at night. They had to haul up pipes, plumbing and floors. The Broadway play, “Rent,” – that was their life. The loft, like their love, has transformed over the years from something plain and acceptable to something rich and beautiful, a tapestry of memories they have made and the loves and tragedies they have shared. And like their life together, it is woven of dreams fulfilled and magical moments that still await their touch.

Charles and Arne are two parts that fit together: something that doesn’t happen often but, when it does, it’s the wildest experience to witness. I met them both a little over 20 years ago, and their love has come to be a sweet reflection of what is possible, it has stood to inspire me with a vision of hope and served as a benchmark for my relationships.

I have watched others lives intertwine and then unravel including my own, but theirs have harmoniously held together, like the perfect notes in a symphony, no matter what storm they are going through or crisis they are facing.

Charles understands that Arne, a world famous photographer, needs to be surrounded by dead animals. It looks like a taxidermy shop exploded in their Tribeca loft. You can’t go to the bathroom without dead animals watching you. Depending on Arne’s latest project, gallery-opening or photography book, the loft could be full 10 x 10 framed blow-ups of chewed up dog toys, the neighbors across the street, sock monkeys or the forensic heads of unsolved murdered victims, many who were the murdered girls of Juarez.

Arne understands that Charles, a creative director, and interior designer, needs to be surrounded by beauty, fine things and architecture books. He recognizes the need Charles has to go with me on zany spiritual adventures where we have bolted all over the world searching for mystical mysteries to solve. The only thing we lack is a van, some hip friends and a dog-named Scooby-Doo.

Like a car thrown in reverse, their relationship has had to move backward. These two men have already proven what traditional wedding vows can only hope, “in sickness and health, better or worse, richer or poorer.” They have comforted, honored, loved and cherished each other day in and day out for over 11,000 days.

Finally, Charles and Arne are planning a wedding and trying to decide what to do for the ceremony. I was thinking they should do something unconventional like Coney Island, or perhaps something simple at the justice of the peace’s office. While Charles and I were in Tibet, we met a nurse who informed us that she was married to the captain of a spaceship from the Pleiades star cluster. Obviously, she was on her own trip, but perhaps her husband could marry them. As a captain of a ship he would have the authority, which I think is a stellar idea. An interstellar idea.

Yankee_stadium_exterior But after everything they have been through, after all the prejudice they have faced and overcome, I have come to realize it is the spark of spirit within the individual soul that makes this sort of love possible at all. It is the inner uniqueness that makes life meaningful at each stage; that makes love a possibility at any moment, and that makes each moment susceptible and vulnerable. Love doesn’t answer to doctrine or dogmas, for there is no theory or system that can substitute for a life unlived, for a story undeveloped, for fate not faced, for a destiny not embraced, and for a love not known. For this reason, I hope that they marry at Yankee Stadium. Not only because of it’s significance to New York and New Yorkers, but because their relationship is just like baseball. When the bases are loaded, and it’s the bottom of the 9th the best player is brought out to bat one out of the park – just as the fans hold their breaths wondering if this feat can really happen. For their 36 years together, Charles and Arne are living proof of the miracle that love can be. Every time life has thrown them a curveball, they have managed to continually bat one out of the park, standing confidently together because, in the end, love is the victorious winner, because in the end, love always bats last.

Live Your Story

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Was it just me? Or, did the other 17 million people watching the riveting Bruce Jenner interview in which he came out as a transgender woman on 20/20 with Diane Sawyer find Bruce Jenner to be the kindest, bravest and gentlest soul in the universe?

Unfortunately most people didn’t hear of Jenner until watching the public spectacle that is “The Kardashians,” America’s own famous-for-being-famous family. But I have been a Jenner fan since I was barely a teenager. I was glued to the TV as I watched him win the decathlon in the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics and thus becoming the best athlete in the world. I was the first on my block to bolt out and buy the Wheaties box with his photo on the front, and I didn’t even eat Wheaties. I had a poster of Jenner hanging in my room, and he inspired me every day to be my best. To me, he will always be the archetypical Olympic hero who rocked the world with his athletic abilities.

When I discovered that my son Sam was dyslexic, I hung a photo of Jenner in his room, because he too is dyslexic. I read one of Jenner’s books in which he said that he hated school. But in the 5th grade, he discovered he could run. And run Bruce did for years and years away from himself…until he stopped running and sat in front of Diane Sawyer.

The irony of Jenner’s story is that the Kardashians were trying to run with the big dogs and doing a whole lot of nothing but shopping –were trying so desperately to be the story. But Bruce stated, “I had the story…the one real, true story in the family was the one I was hiding and nobody knew about.”

That’s when the interview hit a real nerve with me. Even if you can’t relate to his specific situation, everyone knows what it’s like to have a family dynamic drastically change and how scary it is to realize that nothing is ever going to be the same. If you strip away the reality show headlines the Kardashians are just a close-knit family, granted a crazy mess, but they love each other and like the rest of us are not above dealing with the complicated issues. The family’s acceptance of Jenner, and the enormous influence they have on our culture, along with their hundreds of millions of social media followers, provides an extremely powerful platform.

Jenner told Diane Sawyer, “We’re going to do some good here,” and I admit he certainly changed my views of what it means to be a transgender and the agonizing decisions they must face, the ridicule, and the harassment. I wonder how many of us could face such mockery? There was a statistic during the interview that stated 80% of Americans know someone who is gay but only 9% know someone who is transgender. Jenner has changed that forever. We all know Jenner now. He opened up his chest cavity and showed us his soul – which, as he said, was that of a woman. I hope we all will collectively stand by Jenner and others who are battling with this difficult decision. I know that is my plan.

Jenner has gone from Olympic superstar, a Playgirl cover, author, and reality show character and now he has strong-armed his way into our hearts with his tenderness. Thirty-nine years after winning the title of the strongest athlete in the world, he continues to show world-class strength. He reminds us that nothing is stronger than gentleness.

Bruce Jenner, I applaud you. I commend you. I want to be just like you. Courageous. Kind. Strong. And above all else, honest. Jenner has taught us all that one person can change the world, just by living his story. I wonder what the world would be like if we all did the same.

Michelle Cromer