I have a niece out in Bishop walking a thorny path to a lake barefoot.
She's at a school where she gets to be barefoot except when she's in the kitchen, which is really the only place regular city people are barefoot. What kind of school teaches barefoot?
My school was New York City and I left often just for that reason, because there was nowhere to be barefoot. I needed to feel everything, with skin.
New York City is immersion in reality, I felt sharp wind saw boys with black slicked back hair, everyone wore black in fact, color was for babies or the purple flag of the school. Maybe things have changed but back to my barefoot girl.
I was out on the trail with my horse that I managed to fall off of and not die a few months ago, and I was out alone with dirty hair and shorts and floppies hanging off my feet and even though I somehow again live in one of the biggest cities in the country, I'm out on my horse walking the little trail, crawling silent on the perimeter, grateful for the dirt and the away.
Summer is waning even though I've done nothing to stop it except spend as much time immersed in water, either freezing ocean or pool. The one daughter is young enough that she will go places with me still and the older one is in her computer wanting the stars wanting to study the stars for college, her mind a galaxy. I have to always call to her come outside. Look at the light. At twilight. Come look at the leaves. It took me all summer to realize that she can hear my voice.
The niece is in Bishop, in a tiny school where they put rye in a pillowcase and bang it with sticks and pour it from container to container to let the husks fly off in the wind and the seeds gather in the buckets and they will grind it to make rye bread and she's living off the land in a place that says go walk barefoot. Go read. Go write letters. Go be lonely maybe. Go be disappointed. Maybe there's nothing. Maybe there's something underneath.
The boarder horse at our house had a stroke and the owner had an animal communicator come out. She said the chickens were happy.
How could a chicken not be happy. Unless it's being eaten. A chicken is happy. Well they can't smile. So they are more like content. They're walking barefoot in feet made for treachery. Have you looked at chicken feet? They are beyond capable. They look like tiny horror movies. Muscledirt and action.
Here in the city we're trying so hard to stay above drowning in the busy, I forget and then remember the things that are keeping me alive, the simplest things.
Curling on a lap. Walking a trail. Untying shoes. Thinking you're making rye when you're really just watching the husks fly off in the wind. Being somewhere weird that is giving your feet a chance to understand barefoot. Starting over, at her school they are saying start over, and trust the earth.
She wrote me that walking to that lake she found that the places on the path you think will have the most thorns have none. And that walking back from the lake you're wet and your feet get covered in sand and you have a nice layer to protect you from the thorns.
Maybe that's nothing. Maybe there's something underneath.
Come out and look at the light.
