Walking Around "Barefoot"

Blogger is increasingly coming up with new ways to "monetize" the blogging experience, allowing you to make money by putting up ads or amazon.com links. I'm a little leery of the idea, perhaps because I'm still wedded to the idea of artistic expression for its own sake, uncorrupted by commercialism--or something like that. It's hard not too, typing this post as I do in a non-commercial radio station.

But I have to say something about a recent purchase of mine: the Vibram Five Fingers.

I'm not going to use this space to wax poetic about the merits of barefoot shoes and how they let you feel connected with the earth man. Anyway the company's website already does that pretty well. I am going to tell a little story.

Since I got the shoes, I've tried to regularly go on short jogs around my neighborhood in order to get my feet used to running in a different way, and get used to the "shoes". On one such occasion I went out to the small park near my house in an effort to find more grass to run on. This park was apparently one of the reasons my parents decided to live where we live. "We'll be right next to a park! We can go running there whenever we want!" This didn't turn out happening very much...

I myself had not been back to this park in quite a while. One particularly memorable occasion sticks out though, as it did when I was finishing up my jog. A long time ago my girlfriend at the time and I picknicked, by the bank of the stream that runs through this park, and thinking of this I stopped there to sit for a while after my jog. My memory of that day is undoubtedly effected to the events that followed it, in the way that so many memories are changed by future events. Still, I remember it as one of my happiest experiences. We'd ridden bikes from where she lived down to the park and brought along some wine and cheese. It was the sense of peace and freedom that I remember most. I had the sort of feeling that makes one feel like this could go on forever, like there could be many other days like this one.

She had at one time told me about walking up and down streams out in the metroparks, barefoot, in the summer when it's really hot. She suggested we do this together when the summer came, and it was something I looked forward to as the spring went on.

Due to an added benefit of my "shoes" allowing me to go sockless, I decided to wade into the stream, which came up to my ankles. I walked upstream, with a sort of childlike sense of wonder at having gained access to a part of my home that had always been here, but just slightly out of reach. It's so easy and yet it's often the easy things that get put off indefinitely. It's a shame, because you don't always get another shot at it.