Footsteps in the Forest

How one simple walk in the woods reminded me how supported I really am.

The other day I had an elusive “perfect” parenting afternoon. It was one of those days that just opened up with nothing pulling me here or there. It’s the exact kind of day I had hoped for while not working—I just had the unrealistic expectation that there would be more of them.

I went to pick up my littlest from school, a task that I often outsource to my parents in the chaos of being an unpaid Uber driver for three kids. When I do pick him up, I love watching his face light up when he recognizes my car and comes bounding into the backseat. He is an orb of light and always has been, a joyful, optimistic, curiosity-contagious soul.

I told him that we had to circle back to the high school to check on his brother who was attending a tennis practice. So we pulled in, saw that everything was sorted, and I suggested we take a walk in the woods together.

This spring has been very slow to bloom. It has been cold, and the trees barely have green buds on them. That afternoon it was relatively warm and partly cloudy and simply perfect for a walk. There are trails behind the tennis courts and those woods house the pre-k classroom and play area that he attended a few short years ago. So they are “his woods” in a way, a familiar landscape filled with the footprints of his littler self.

He was showing me all his spots and reminiscing. He correctly identified a chickadee bird call. We could hear the noises of the sports events just over the hill above us, but we felt a world away. It was one of those moments when I was fully present, and it felt like just a moment and all of eternity all at once.

It was then that I made the suggestion that we take off our shoes and socks and feel the earth.

Being barefoot has been a loose thread in my life through various people and had recently come up again at the oddest time. I was sitting with my husband at the kitchen store where we were finalizing our cabinets. (Yes, it has taken me months to orient myself in the complex kitchen renovation world…a topic for another day.) I was talking to the lovely owner and she asked how I had been feeling. I proceeded to speak about the deep fatigue that settles over you like fog during cancer and treatment and recovery. The fog hasn’t quite lifted.

“Have you been grounding?” She asked.

I admit to having some curiosity about the “grounding shoes” and other commercial products that crowd my social media feeds. But I kind of shrugged it off as one of those things that capitalism has created a demand for because we have become so removed from our own natural ecosystem we now need special shoes to imitate it.

No, I hadn’t tried grounding, I admitted. She continued talking about the grounding pads that she uses and how she grows most of her own food. It was the third time the term grounding had made its way to my ears that week, and I took it as a sign.

I always remember my mom speaking about how her feet were weathered as a child from walking on the rocks of Long Island Sound. That story felt like a family myth, a tiny detail that said something large about who she was and where she was from and therefore it said something about me.

My feet have been fairly tender and unweathered for most of my life. I walk barefoot on the beach, of course, and love digging my toes into the sand. I went through a brief period over a decade ago when each step barefoot on the floor felt orgasmic. That was wild. But for the last two and a half years, I haven’t been barefoot much at all. Something about being sick and in treatment had me wrapped up for safe keeping.

My friend is a barefoot runner, and I’ve always admired that in him. He explains it as a certain kind of meditation: you have to pay more attention when your feet aren’t protected by layers of rubber and foam and plastic.

My paths also randomly crossed with a infamous Caribbean singer named Barefoot Man while in the Caymans. Another story for another day.

So being barefoot…not a strong thread, and yet a wisp of something stoked by the conversation in the cabinet store.

As I walked around the woods with my youngest, each new surface was like a mini universe opening up to us. There was moss that was moist and soft and moss that was an entirely different planet, slightly dry and prickly. There was the silkiness of a bed of fallen leaves, winter-weathered. The soft container of a muddy puddle. The massaging curve of a log covered in bark. The trampoline-like buoyancy of dirt surrounding a tree stump. The ice cold rush of the stream over pebbles. The crunch of pine needles and pinecones.

His face would light up with each new surface. It was like a decadent feast for the senses of our soles. Our attention narrowed, and we simply felt and conversed with the ground. The transmission was real. Wisdom without words.

It was then that he said with pure, delighted innocence: “I didn’t know life could be this good!”

From the mouth of babes. Truth. Such simple, pedestrian (in the sense of literally “on foot”) truth. That word, pedestrian, was first used in the 1700s to imply commonness, dull, unimaginative. This experience was anything but. At least in modern times. Walking barefoot on my own two feet felt rare and revelatory.

I asked him if he thought the earth had any sense of us walking on it. His response was immediate and unquestioned: “Once you’re connected to the earth, the earth can tell our hearts.”

We were headed back to the car by that point, carrying our shoes. After that we would proceed to the beach to look for beautiful shells and rocks and sea glass, and he would end up in a luxurious bubble bath. And at the dinner table we would debate what our top three favorite surfaces were in the woods. Mine was undoubtedly the fallen leaves. What an incredible blanket the trees gift us each year.

It was an exquisite, pedestrian evening.

As we exited the woods though, I felt supported in a way I didn’t feel when I had entered it. Like the earth itself knew my heart and was carrying me.

At my low point during chemo I remember a dear friend saying I didn’t have to find the strength to carry myself through the darkest time. That was what friends, and family, and my health care team, were for. They were there to carry me when I couldn’t carry myself.

It’s the most obvious thing that we are literally supported by the earth through our journeys in this life. But when was the last time you really acknowledged it? Really allowed your body to feel that enduring, unconditional support? We get so caught up in our heads. But the body knows and understands things we will never be able to intellectually comprehend.

So go outside, wherever you are, and take your shoes off. Feel the grass or the pavement or the sand. Get your toes a little dirty. And just let yourself be known by the earth for a moment. Let her steadiness slowly stoke your gratitude. She quietly holds so much of the loads we are carrying, physical and otherwise.

“It’s like life in footsteps.” My littlest had said, remarking about the variety of our short, barefoot journey. Indeed, we never know exactly where our next step is going to take us. But whatever the texture—hard, soft, murky, sturdy, slippery—we just keep putting one foot in front of the other and letting the earth gently, powerfully guide us on our path.