Earth Soles
“Earth Soles”
WILD AND CHILD
“Wild”
An urgent demand “in” the blood.
Hearing Calling,
disturbing whisper at day,
Howling, woke at night,
Drumming Moon to Sun.
Dumbing thoughts grow weak,
Path Calling Cadence.
Beckoning Birds fly,
Forest Fiddler, Wicked and Good,
Eyes Intense and Fast Dance,
Leaves Toe Tapping,
Wind Peaks, Flautist.
Mesmerizing inaudible melodies,
Ears Strain – Eye Yearning-Feet Wanting,
Horizon Sounding.
A Calling Flight of Feral,
Know the Feel of Soles Soaring,
Primal silhouetted Run.
Escape!
Looking For Wild,
For Will of Wild,
Savage Grace,
Killed in Captivity.
Elemental, Pure Freedom,
Pure Passion, Pure hunger, Pure Cold.
A Manifesto!
Human Spirit has a Primal Allegiance,
Vigorous and Raw,
Quick of Spirit.
Paradox!
Savage in deepest sense is gentle,
And what is wild is kind.
Strangely Sweet Results,
“Child”
mick
Stepping Out of the Shoe Box!
Yoish! I feel it is necessary to warn the shod and sedentary that there is a danger in stepping out of shoes and engaging the land with your naked soles and learning to step into your primal body memory.
Because it will “make sense”!
And “making sense” is addictive.
It is a challenge for the tender feet at first. But it is an adventure! After all it requires that you pay attention and give up “Marching with Denial and Domination”.
But in time and with practice paying attention to where and how you place your foot begins the awakening of a new story.
The soles open and the flow of sensory information stimulates a deep fire inside of you, a remembering of a deep desire to step further into playing with the land, craving more and more tactile sensory flow, storing it in your body. You just might find yourself wondering around in the mountains as i did, wondering about the story that you are living. You begin to feel and track the simple things in your life. Where does the water i drink come from? Where does the food come from? Why is there a stink in the wind i breath? Why is there so much noise? When was the last time that i rested my eyes on natural organic reflections? Why do i fear touching the land? What is wrong with the story of civilization?
It is an interesting thing to notice about story. The fundamental meaning of the word is to store. We gather things. Then we store them and then we release them. When you begin to follow your feet out of denial. You begin a journey that opens a sensory flow that “stores” in you feelings that change your awareness, and releases a new telling, a new story.
A story is good if it “makes sense”, making sense in the most direct meaning of the word, direct touch of the land. “Making Sense” by touching the land. I found this foot notion of “making sense” in the book Spell of the Sensous, by David Abhrams. I took this foot notion along with the book on a long Foot Quest in the Cascades. I trained with it for days and days. I would read a few pages and then go on a long footing and think about what i had read, or i would build a fire, gather some stones, dance with them until a trance and think about “making sense”, pulling with my muslces into “common sense”, “community sense”. It is a good training manual. But he left out a very important point: Take this book for a walk or run in the last of the wild. For the sedentary have forgotten this point, have forgotten how to “make sense” with their feet and “make story”.
I do the same with the exuberant animal manuals. They are foot notions to guide me into understanding the predicament of our modern sedentary living. Just check out the essay Pathology on Parade on the website.
Training requires three things, knowledge, skill and desire. These three points are like a three pointed compass that guide me into “making sense”, “making story”.
So my warning is that following your feet will change your story, change the way you feel the way you think, the way you share story, the way you relate (play) with the land.
Much easier to stay defeeted in the story of domination and denial, not healtheir or happier, not making sense, just less effort.
I share the pictures of my bed roll and tent, one suggestion for stepping out of the shoe box.
mick
"Following Your Feet. WOW! HOW? NOW!
Yoish! I follow my feet in a simple Foot Fitness Practice called “Going On Foot”, in order to awakeng my Primal footing with Practical movement and forms, by Playing with the land.
At the Exuberant Animal Rhythmic Training Hall, (EARTH GYM). We begin our training journey by stepping out of the physical insulations of modern living and distance our soles from the social dominaton and alienation, and are on a foot pursuit for Animal X-uberance.
In the days to come i will be sharing the “Naked Sole Training Manual” in this blog. I will be presenting “Foot Notions”. Foot notions are training concepts that come from going on Foot Training Quest, which is the practice of taking knowledge and skills into the Last of the Guraded wild and getting a naked feel for them in movement with the land, musing with the Muscles the Music of the land, using primal motion to explore training notions.
A Foot Notion:
WOW-HOW-NOW, is a training mantra that came to me many years ago when i was footing the land as a Bare Foot Bard. I spent many seasons in the mountains cultivating a practice of aligning my talk and walk to the path. I followed my feet out of shoes, artificial surface areas, sedentary machines and technology, and the social pressures and accepted the path as my coach, my teacher, and i did so with naked feet.
When you step out of the insulation and engage your naked soles the word WOW! arises. WOW! that feels good, or WOW! that feels bad. The next simple word to guide me was HOW?, a question. How do i adapt to the pain? How do I adapt to the pleasure? The “HOW” leads the feet into cultivating a practice. Then comes the “NOW!” The knowledge, skills and desires gathered and learned in the “HOW” settles down into a normal response, NOW! and i am then ready to move on into the next WOW!
So i use WOWHOWNOW as a mantra to guide me further into not only HOW? i Go On Foot in the land, but how i sleep, eat and relax. This tent you see here is located on Whidbey Island and is the center of the Foot Path that i am journeying on. It is located between the Olympic Mountains and the Cascades. It is where I will be holding Foot Fitness Out Fitting sessions, and the oral delivery of Foot Notions and the Naked Sole Training Manual.
Foot The X-uberance!
Mick
"Making Sense with your feet."
Stepping out of shoes landing in your naked soles and feeling the land in order to “make sense”. It is why i follow my feet into feeling, into awareness, into consciousness, and learn that movement and habit is formed in habitat.
“Human persons are shaped by the places they inhabit, both individually and collectively. Our bodily rhythms, our moods, cycles of creativity and stillness, and even our thoughts are readily enganged and influenced by shifting patterns in the land. Yet our organic attunement to the local earth is thwarted by our ever-increasing intercourse with our own signs. Transfixed by our technologies, we short-circuit the sensorial reciprocity between our breathing bodies and the bodily terrain. Human awareness folds in upon itself, and the senses–once the crucial site of our engagement with the wild and animate earth–become mere adjuncts of an isolate and abstract mind bent on overcoming an organic reality that now seems disturbingly aloof and arbitrary.
The alphabetized intellect stakes its claim to the earth by staking it down, extends its dominion by drawing a grid of straight lines and right angles across the body of a continent–across North America, across Africa, across Australia–defining states and provinces, countries and scant regard for the oral peoples that already live there, according to a calculative logic utterly oblivious to the life of the land.
If i say that i live in the “United States” or in “Canada,” in “British Columbia” or in “New Mexico,” I situate myself within a purely human set of coordinates. I say very little or nothing about the earthly place that I inhabit, but simply establish my temporary location within a shifting matrix of political, economic, and civilizational forces struggling to maintain themselves, today, largely at the expense of the animate earth. The great danger is that i, and many other good persons, may come to believe that our breathing bodies really inhabit these abstractions, and that we will lend our lives more to consolidating, defending, or bewailing the fate of these ephermeral entities than to nurturing and defending the actual places that physically sustain us.
The land that includes us has its own articulations, its own contours and rhythms that must be acknowledged if the land is to breathe and flourish. Such patterns, for instance, are those traced by rivers as they wind their way to the coast, or by a mountain range that rises like a backbone from the plains, its ridges halting the passage of clouds that gather and release their rains on one side of the range, leaving the other slope dry and desertlike. Another such contour is the boundary between two very different kinds of bedrock formed by some cataclysmic event in the story of a continent, or between two different soils, each of which invites a different population of plants and trees to take root. Diverse groups of animals arrange themselves within such subtle boundaries, limiting their movements to the terrain that affords them their needed foods and the necessary shelter from predators. Other, more migratory species follow such patterns as they move with the seasons, articulating routes and regions readily obscured by the current human overlay of nations, states, and their various subdivisions. Only when we slip beneath the exclusively human logic continually imposed upon the earth dow we catch sight of this other, older logic at work in the world. Only as we come close to our senses, and begin to trust, once again, the nuanced intelligence of our sensing bodies, do we begin to notice and respond to the subtle logos of the land.
There is an intimate reciprocity to the senses; as we touch the bark of a tree, we feel the tree touching us; as we lend our ears to the local sounds and ally our nose to the seasonal scents, the terrain gradually tunes us in turn. The senses, that is, are the primary way that the earth has of informing our thoughts and of guiding our actions. Huge centralized programs, global initiatives, and other “top down” solutions will never suffice to restore and protect the health of the animate earth. For it is only at the scale of our direct, sensory interactions with the land around us that we can appropriately notice and respond to the immediate needs of the living world.”
Following the feet into remembering our sensory grip of the land is a simple journey of two feet.
The BareFoot SenSay,
mick