It started with Valentine’s Day. Scott got me a basket of goodies from Pangea, which included some body scrub. I remember smelling it while I worked there, but I never bought any because I am kind of a product minimalist. (Until recently, my half of the shower contained conditioner, soap, and a razor and nothing more.) Still, I figured I may as well enjoy the body scrub. I quickly found it to be a bit too abrasive for most of me, but nice for my feet. I was nearing the end of the teacher training, and my feet had gotten a bit roughed up from all that time on the mat. After a couple of weeks of giving my feet some scrubby love every day, my balancing postures improved. Since my feet seemed to be rewarding me for the attention, I explored other forms of foot scrub, and continued the ritual, even throwing in some lotion at night (which I learned the hard way is not the best move on the nights before I go to Bikram in the morning – slippery!). Spring happened, as did my sudden illogical need for seriously sexy shoes, and how could I have shoes like that without painting my toes? For years, I kept my toes painted every summer, but didn’t last year, because I was going for walks every day and my sneakers messed up the polish too quickly*.
Somewhere in this process, I started to really enjoy having fine looking feet, and it has become a source of vanity. I’m like Narcissus, only instead of drowning in my own reflection, I’m going to accidentally kick myself in the head. Then, last week I went off what for me is the grooming deep end – I started using a pumice stone on my feet. So far, so good.
As this has been happening, feet and shoes have been showing up all over my blog, in my other writing, and all over my life. I can’t help but get a little yogic about it. In the patterns of my life, this is usually the point at which I would be getting ready to move somewhere, but I’m not. It’s all very first chakra. Whether one buys that there are energy centers in the body or not doesn’t really matter – it’s just another framework for examining the relationship between mind and body. If I consider that everything related to home, tribe, and rootedness lives in the first chakra, it makes sense that without a move on which to focus there is this massive amount of first chakra energy flying around that has to manifest somewhere – in this case, creatively, and in the use of bath products. And if you don’t buy the whole chakra thing, it holds up symbolically as well: feet = moving. Easy.
So, the moral of this story is that not moving every two years yields not only friendships, creative passion, and personal growth, but iPhones and pretty feet.
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At some point this Spring I figured out that, duh, I could wear chacos or some other kind of sport sandal apparatus when I go for walks.
