Happy Feet

👣 Happy Feet 

It was chunky and juicy, the sensation of my barefoot feet on the parquet. I can't describe it any better than a full-bodied walk. It was so delicious that food adjectives seem to narrate the experience the best.

It tells a story, the impetus in the arches of our feet 👣 : the filling out and filling in of them.

I was pressing my whole foot into the floor, something I rarely do consciously. I felt my whole foot suck in the wood, as if it were craving it (which it probably was, being used to rubber soles.) Yes: it felt like there were suction pads under my heel and under the balls where callouses sometimes grow to protect me...even my toes became little suction cups.

How glorious to take the time to truly feel the walk! To feel my weight slowly change, stabilizing in the center of one foot while the other almost dangled in mid-air, only the ball supporting it. And then I pushed through the limits of stability, leaning into the toes of the first foot until the second took flight, landing just ahead of the first. But it wasn't a race: both feet were moving forward, working together to bring me somewhere. The where didn't matter–it was the concentration on the how that was important.

 And then, we reached the end of our journey across the parquet. For some, it was the end of their mat. For me, I had almost reached our leader in this trip into our sensations.

But it wasn't the end! We retraced our steps backward, this time thinking of our toes first. But steps were framed around the suction of our feet all the same. We soon stopped to take stock of our stability. And that was the end of our trip, and the beginning of many others. 

Photo: a href="https://pixabay.com/users/stocksnap-894430/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=2617757">StockSnap</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com//?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=2617757">Pixabay</a>

Text: Kristen Mastromarchi