(photo: feet soaking in a plastic storage bin with focus on a clay medicine pot necklace from Rebecca's Apothecary in Boulder, CO)
"it's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your front door. If you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might get swept off to."
- Bilbo Baggins (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Don’t forget about your feet. Pay attention to your feet. Time and time again, receiving healings, this is the advice I have been told. Until recently, in just the last couple of years really, I have finally been able to hear these words and act upon them; my relationship with my feet has been complicated over my lifetime.
As a child, I was completely flat-footed. I felt intense pain in my hips, knees, and ankles which I learned to live with, walking slowly and hiking with intention, the vibrant music of nature so much more thrilling than the pain was debilitating. Finally, at the age of 12, a doctor succumbed to my mother’s pleas and gave us a referral to a physical therapist, who told me that my hips were rotated in, most likely from birth, causing all my leg joints to be positioned incorrectly, and my inner thigh muscles to be completely atrophied, if they had ever worked at all. And so I moved from the outdoors to the gym, focusing now on building muscle activity and aligning my joints, my connection to the earth now beginning to atrophy in place of diligently following instruction, carefully wrapping my ankles, only wearing shoes with grey rubber soles for their strength and arch support, orthotics to correct my feet.
As I grew up, disillusioned more and more with society, detached more and more from the outdoors, a rebellion began brewing inside me. Screw doctors, screw society, screw instructions, high heels it shall be. Sure, looking back the logic in this is difficult to comprehend, but it absolutely made sense at the time. So for years I reveled in shoes that contorted my feet into bizarre positions, placing focused weight on the balls of my feet, smashing my toes together. I despised my feet at the time. Massive, wide, ugly things. If only they could be slimmer, fit more easily into these contraptions.
But in 2012 my feet spoke up. Every morning for weeks on end, I awoke with every cell in my body whispering, then stating, then shouting at me, go to Peru. My feet ached for this, and I had a feeling that if I just started walking they would get me there. But I had many responsibilities at the time, and I couldn’t justify doing something so illogical. Every day, I pushed away these primal exaltations, orders, and grievances, and went about my day, ignoring my bodily needs, my feet still taking me where I decided. Eventually the feelings dissipated.
Then, in 2018, after a long series of self-sacrifices, after laying so much of myself to rest that I was barely recognizable, I had a new impulse to travel. I got an offer for a credit card, and logic and responsibility be damned, I applied and got approved. To this day, I have no idea why a company would approve that decision, and I’m so grateful they did. I followed the impulse to Europe via Iceland, unbelievable magic at every turn, letting my feet guide me. For the first time since I was a child, I listened to my feet and let them lead the way, rebirthing me a child of the earth once more. But that’s a much longer story.
Since 2018 I have let my feet guide me more and more. I now have great flexibility in the arch of my feet, they can wrap around stone and flatten to the earth, and yet I walk with strength and without pain. I began photographing my feet on the earth, in gorgeous and vibrant moments, and in looking through them with that lens, I began to love the way they look, the way they move, and the way they hold me. I feel so blessed to have this relationship with my feet now, and I am sure to nurture them daily, grateful for their guidance in this complicated world.
No matter how I have judged them, no matter how I have hated them, my feet have always held me up, carried me where I wanted and needed to go, and now that I trust them, I allow their guidance between realms, one foot firmly planted in this earth, the other free to step into subtle dimensions. I am so excited to see where they go in this wholly intentional journey.
- Juliette
The first time I went on the specific species of adventure that Juliette and I are about to embark on, I was probably eight or nine. My family kept a cabin on the broad shoulder of a remote mountain in Colorado. The roads winding up to it had all started as deer trails, and many trails remained. They were as clear and established as human ones, though sometimes the ferns were so enthusiastic that we had to navigate by the bite marks wintering elk left on the aspen trees. My brothers would take sticks in charge into the woods, waging and unwinnable war against the tall cow parsley flowers that gave them such bad allergies, inevitably collapsing, and gripping each other with all the delighted intensity of little Bravehearts. And I would take the opportunity to sneak away, slip off my shoes, and go barefoot on the deer paths.
Senses awaken. The sole of a foot counting the inches of depth in the pine needle blanket below. Forests are never really silent… Wood ants. Chickadees. And always a slight breath of wind, even only touching the upper branches and then swishing down the soft-brushed needles.
I would come home polkadotted with pinesap, stuck into the canyons of my feet like gummy tar, and I never felt so wonderful.
Cut to 23 year old me, on the largest scale journey of that kind I had done to date. As a graduation present, I'd asked my parents for a trip to Lithuania, where my grandfather was from. Also, a Goddess kept showing up in my dreams and telling me to go. I was actually so push and pull about it internally, even after my parents had said yes, that she visited me while I was sitting in a field, instructed me to pull out my phone, and told me exactly which flights to buy. The final cost was all primes. After that, when I had doubts, they weren't much dead weight.
I bought a new pair of shoes for the trip (a rare occurrence for me). Converse were the pick, because their soles are so thin you can feel every pebble, and I loved that. If I could have gone barefoot, I would have. Each step was extra important because for eight years I'd been working on a stress pattern of holding tension in my left hip that caused all sorts of trouble in my back, and out to my ancle and neck. It was like I was trying to make a nucleus out of an electron by curling around it... because the real nucleus of my root invoked other complications. I studied Tai Chi with fascination, left it all on the dance floor, dabbled in somatic psychology and authentic movement, and finally I started to step differently.
In Lithuania, I could really feel it. There's an ancient watch tower on a pinnacle above the capital city, Vilnius, and with each full bodied motion to get a foot touching the ground my whole skeleton felt fluid, connected. Harmonious. If I'd ever felt that before, it was different this time, because I had grown conscious of it.
Those converse just quit on me. I'm in new shoes again, special for this trip, and I feel so precious about breaking them in right. I want them to mold to my new way of walking. Not to how my ancle still turns in too much sometimes. Not to how I tend to step more onto the heel, not enough balanced between heel and toe pad. In Tai Chi, the spot in the middle of the foot right under the toe pad is called the bubbling well, where energy from the earth can come up and through your body. Yeah. I want that.
I've been thinking about this because Juliette and I are (magically) synced on our moon cycles, which feels very auspicious as we live over a thousand miles apart and both have changing alignments with the actual moon. We laughed about this and then quickly agreed to make a detour to a shmancy hot springs in France (possibly the only hot springs in France... that's findable on google), as close to that time of the month as we can plan it, and in the illustrious, hilarious menu of offerins (featuring a "deliciously nonchalant" massage), we both chose a treatment that focuses on legs and feet. It includes some very scientific sounding apple oil and something that's aparently a blanket made of water - it's going to be so weird and I can't wait.
It feels really important to be going into this new journey with that kind of intentionality around our feet.
At the very least, maybe it'll lean us towards Uncle Bilbo's advice and we won't end up slipping through a circle of toadstools and showing up in a hundred years, or as a hundred years old, which seems rediculously likely. I mean, I've always heard you should tell folks your coordinates before you go into the backcountry... set the gps for the gnome dimension plz?
- Larkin
P.S.
Here is a recipe for a great body scrub, especially for feet :)
Salt/Sugar Body Scrub
Ingredients:
- 3/4 cup organic sugar
- 1/4 cup fine salt
- 1 cup epsom salt
- 1/2 cup oil (olive oil, jojoba, apricot kernel, grapeseed, or coconut, shea, mango GENTLY melted - in which case, stir in and keep stirring while it hardens to room temp or whip it/buy it whipped and use a wooden spoon to work it in. My favorite is half parts shea and mango)
- Up to ten drops of essential oils, or a teaspoon of Vanilla extract, Cinnamon, Rose powder, ground Ginger, or another herb you're working with at the time
*For feet specifically, Vetiver oil and Burdoch root are lovely for tending and grounding.
- Sometimes I add in Rose, Hibiscus, Calendula, and Chamomile petals just for the added affect :)
- Up to a tablespoon of corn starch, if you like things less oily.
- Mix all ingredients in a mason jar or mixing bowl.
This is great as a full body scrub, but for a face scrub its nice to use a cup of sugar and omit the salt and epsom salt, which makes it more gentle.
If you're in a place without an apothecary or co-op that sells bulk organic herbs, check out Mountain Rose Herbs. And remember, a pound of peppermint is a lot! (she says with still half a bag, five years later.
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