So this Siddhartha Gautama fella, propped there beneath the midnight bodhi tree, feet fitted together like pretzel arms, the light bulb of his consciousness glowing with the pure unbroken filament of now. And in no religious statues or silly garden art, or any other caricatured renditions of the Buddha for that matter, is dude ever wearing any shoes, even in those depictions of him as an older man with great jug ears, getting his fat and jolly jiggle on.
Perhaps barefoot is the best way to the Middle Way, on the long catwalk to enlightenment. Certainly shoeless, you feel so much more. And I don’t mean tapping into those groovy Earth vibrations, the dust of all that is oozing into pores, the notion of being truly grounded, all that, though sure, why not all that? I’m simply thinking more of the thistles and thorns, the rusty bottle caps and glass fragments, the remnants of the rocks of ages and the shards of broken dreams. It’s hard not to be fully present when the present is pricking blood from your toes and the threat of tetanus is making you question when you had your last booster shot.
And I am no Buddhist, by any stretch, but I really like what little I understand of this stuff, the core philosophy if not the trappings of history and geography, the sundry sects and flavors, Theravada, Shingon, Caramel Crunch, Zen, Snickerdoodle, etc. I don’t know for any of that. I simply like that whole thread of compassion, the striving to be nicer, gentler, kinder to myself, you, the Earth, everything. Even more, I am enamored of the fight to be in the moment, to stay one step ahead of the crippling past, and to cease using the present as a stepping-off point for a future that fundamentally can never arrive and, maddeningly, never stops being here.
Steps, in any case. And here we are, arriving again back to feet.
So maybe my own problem, beyond a compulsive nature fixated on becoming and an avocation for chronicling, which stakes so much of itself on dissecting the past, is as simple as the right shoes. Or more fundamentally, the lack of shoes altogether. Maybe I need to be barefoot more. Naked footsies. Naked soles. Naked soul.
Instead, I’m perpetually stepping around myself to peer back behind me, straining my shattered neck to glimpse the shoes I keep wrongly thinking I’ve finally outgrown. And even more, staring fixedly ahead of me, beset by the pressing need to preselect the next path taking me out of where I am now.
And always, always, this waiting, this damnable waiting. For the moment my shoes will come off, and the world will be satin and morning sunlight, and cooling water on hot feet.
For those same overheated puppies to find purchase in a place I finally am overjoyed to keep standing.
For the other shoe to drop.
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