I Never Liked Shoes Anyway.

Grounding - The technique by which a person reconnects with the earth by removing their shoes and placing their bare feet onto the earth. There is some scientific evidence to suggest that electrical charges from the earth into your feet have a positive effect on your well-being, and on your mental health. I don’t remember voluntarily wearing shoes as a young child, I also don’t remember a time when I felt as happy as I did back then either. Not just happy; elated, ecstatic, carefree, without worry, and whole. In fact, all the times I remember being the happiest have always been sans shoes.

I lived in a small village then. Woven into the West Coast like a multi-coloured jewel. The roads were red, dusty, and free of tar while the beaches had the most beautiful sand that would glitter like fish scales when the sun came out. Walking barefoot was a way of life, and I was told to toughen up the soles of my feet for exploring the bush and to dig for mussels hiding in the white sands at the shoreline. The low tide coincided with afternoon jaunts down to the beach after a morning of tracking animals, and no white mussel was safe from my toughened toes. There were black mussels too, but they clung to the rocks for dear life and weren’t easy to claim victory over even though they remain my favourite. Racing to the wet sand just where the tide was out, left those molluscs exposed and vulnerable to my honed foraging abilities. My grandmother and I would take a bucket and place it far enough away so the icy waves could not claim it, building a sand fortress to protect it from toppling over. Then we would walk into the sea to sink our feet into the earth and start to move them around in the soft, wet sand. The Atlantic Ocean lapping at our ankles whilst we did our ‘Mussel Dance’ and flailed our arms and wiggled our butts around to dig deep and retrieve our prize. Moving along an invisible line, we would feel our way around with our feet and lift out mussel after mussel, depositing them into the red bucket until it was overflowing. At this point my grandmother would declare our feet properly exfoliated and clean, and our forage for dinner a success.

I don’t get to put my feet in the sand much anymore, and specifically not that white sand, with the white mussels and the shoreline thousands of miles away from me now. Maybe there is something to be said for it, grounding I mean. Maybe that’s why we have forgotten how to connect, how to really dig in and energise ourselves with the simple pleasures in life, like looking for mussels for dinner, or running barefoot across the bush.

**This is a creative piece that I had to prepare for my workshop. The task was to create a personal memory piece or memoir, and incorporate some of the rules for Creative Non-Fiction writing. After receiving some feedback, and some slight editing and polishing, I have decided to share it here too, after all, we are trying to Refine this Philistine. The above photo was taken on my Mamiya 654, a medium format camera (my baby), loaded with Fuji 400H professional 120 film. Processed by the amazing Canadian Film Lab.

Bussi xxx