lavender&lemon

barefoot

today (april 10) is “one day without shoes” which i believe was started by the people behind toms or something. it’s all marketing, really, but it’s nice to have a socially-acceptable excuse to go barefoot. walking around outside barefoot has always been a rare pleasure. i love the flat slapping of my feet as they hit concrete or pavement, the way my toes spread and stretch with each step, the cool tickle of grass and dirt. so long as it isn’t too hot out or i hit a patch of gravel, i have no regrets for ever going barefoot.

my senior year of high school i ran on the cross-country team. there was one meet where we went out to a ranch in the middle of nowhere, eastern colorado. it was different from our other meets because we had to go through several unique ‘obstacles’. the first was a shallow creek—no big, just splash splash splash through and sure your feet get wet and wet socks are gross as hell, but the cool water feels lovely. then a mile later is the next obstacle: a 15-foot stretch of mud. and by mud, i don’t mean that the trail was a little muddy, or even that it was a little soggy. i mean a huge, honkin’ pit of mud, at least a foot deep, that they cultivate especially for the cross-country kids. there was no feasible way to run through it, either: when you hit the mud, you tried to slog through it as fast as you could, which generally involved a lot of falling and ending up with mud up to your elbows, plastered in your hair, and absolutely all over your legs. and, usually, you emerged shoe-less as well. i thought i had my old gym shoes tied tight enough, but i was only a few steps into the mud when suuuu-ck, off came my left shoe, then another  step and suuuuu-ck, off came the right and there was a whole slew of people in there with me, more coming from behind, and there was no time, i had to keep going, so i went on through the mud, leaving my shoes behind. when i hit the trial again, i peeled off my socks and left them with a growing pile of others, and started running. Not a quarter of a mile later came the real challenge of the race: a stretch of trail that was over-grown with small cacti. there was no way around it, i had to go through it. so i did a funny hopping dance from one patch of clear-ish dirt to the next, but there was no avoiding it: i had to stop almost every few hops to pull yet another golf-ball sized cactus covered in spikes from my ball, heel, or, once, from my littlest toe. actually, they didn’t hurt all that much (aside from the immediate poke and a strange weight) which was good, but oh how i envied those people who had somehow salvaged their shoes from the mud. eventually, i finished the race, trying my darndest to sprint up the slight hill to the finish, mud-and dust-covered feet slap-slapping furiously along the dry dirt path. 

what always surprises me when i go barefoot is how unexpectedly tough my feet are. sure, i know that i have some pretty awesome calluses, but i rarely put them to the test. i guess it’s a metaphor for my life, really. so many times i don’t realize just how tough i am until something happens and my strength is tested yet again. but that’s life for you, it’s never easy or straightforward. if it were, you would never have the joy of realizing that you can survive, that you can walk barefoot.