Dispatches: Barefeet

What I learned from planting all ten toes in the dirt

Isma and me, lying very still for the camera.

I’ve always loved my feet. Well, the bottom of my feet—I’ve never been particularly fond of my toes, and don’t even get me started on my nails. I got a pedicure once and I thought I’d expire from second-hand embarrassment. Never again! I inherited them from my father, including a pinky nail that grows like a cloudy mushroom on the side of a log, and while I have made peace with the astronomical combination of bad decisions and good luck that led to my conception, I feel no great love for the keratin protecting the flesh of my distal phalanges. I clip those suckers and forget about ’em.  

Oh, but the bottom of my feet are another story. I love the way they’re at once tough and wrinkly soft. Back when I regularly practiced Tae Kwon Do, I would trace the deep callus in the middle of the ball of my foot, where I would balance for a fast spin and a hard kick out behind. I’d press on it with my fingernail and marvel that one part of my body was touching another part of my body and all I could feel was the vaguest of pressures at either end. I love the hard edge of my arch and the soft inside that never touches down when I make footprints in the sand. 

My heels have occasionally caused me trouble since I moved to Mexico, drying out and cracking like a clay river bed. This has struck me as mightily unfair since I always moisturize and Isma just scrubs his feet with Zote¹ and yet they maintain a single unblemished callus from toe to heel no matter the weather or shoe-wear. Isma calls this his huarache integrado, developed from a childhood of playing barefoot on the unpaved streets of his hometown. My feet, swaddled in layers of poly-blended fibers during their formative years, are never going to match his for resistance, nor approach that tanned leather beauty. But they have learned to appreciate the free-flowing glory of hanging out in the world by their ten-toed selves. 

Most days, I wear shoes for 30 minutes, tops. Those shoes are flip-flops. Otherwise, me and my feet are hanging out in the open air. I walk on my porch barefoot. I walk on the dirt outside the house barefoot. I’ve figured out how to step on small rocks barefoot—it’s a matter of controlling your center of balance and not putting too much pressure on any one part of your foot. The more I go into the world with my naked feet, the more I hate the idea of sticking them into anything when not strictly necessary. I have an entire bag filled with my slipper collection that I have not opened since I moved here. What if the floor is dirty? I sweep it. What if my feet are still dirty? I wash them off before I go to bed. 

I wouldn’t do this in Mexico City—the black layer of grime you accumulate in sandals there is too much even for this hippie heart—but out here in the country I’ve discovered that barefoot (unpregnant) in the kitchen is a heart-filling place to be. The dirt between my toes feels integrated, as Isma might say, just another part of the world I’m living in. 

I remember now back in Mexico City I had a friend who was a different hippie type, a practicing Buddhist, who had lived all over the world and was about to move to Nepal to do his Master’s in religious studies. He was a funny guy—he’d sit down on a crowded metro and practice meditation right there, and then we’d go to a sports bar to watch boxing. One time we met up at a Starbucks—his choice, because it was one of the few coffee shops that he could be sure would have three-pronged outlets for his grounding device. “Grounding device?” I asked him. “You mean your charger?” He shook his head and showed me a blue rubber laptop mat, about an inch thick. The only unusual thing about it was the cord connecting it to the wall. 

“We have a lot of health problems nowadays because we’re never connected to the earth. No one walks around with bare feet these days.”

“And that’s what your laptop mat is doing? It’s…connecting you to the earth?”

He nodded, very pleased with himself. 

It sounded like nonsense to me then and it continues to seem like an overpriced laptop mat to me now, but I’ve begun to wonder if there isn’t something to the idea that walking with your feet on the ground brings happiness. 

Maybe not because my electrical field is literally harmonizing with the earth’s (how would that even work), but simply because I have stopped placing a barrier at that metaphorical-literal level between me and the planet. I acknowledge that I am a part of her, and that acknowledgement brings peace, which brings happiness.

(This is like one of those memes, isn’t it? Tell me you’re a middle-aged hippie living on a mountain without telling me.)

Try it sometime, though. The next time you’re outside, take off your shoes and socks, kick off all that insulation, and plant your toes in the ground. Feel anything? Some rocks? Some grass? Some mud and dirt? Yeah, I didn’t say you’d feel inner peace. It’s just the earth.

Isn’t that enough?

1. Mexico’s all-purpose soap of champions.