today i did something weird

I did something that would excite me.

I decided to go on a walk.

A walk with no shoes, no socks, bare ole feet on the paved world. I was scared about glass and needles and whatever else, but I was also missing being a kid and wandering-wondering the world with no care in the world, also while mostly not wearing shoes.

I just walked to the park, not but a block away. I meandered around the park, picked up objects, looked at them, examined them, and then decided whether to keep the object or not. I like the texture of things just in the field of sight let alone the field of touch and felt experience. A couple of nut like objects, some leaves in varying states of aliveness in appearance, and a stick. The stick is so smooth, and feels almost weightless too. It feels almost of nothing, but almost also of everything at the same time.

Just to be in a moment and with nature in a way where time ceases to exist and all that exists is my experience of that moment. It is special to be alive. It is also other things too, some things are hard to talk about, and that's OK. It can feel quite hard to find things to be alive about these days. For me, I find my best days are most often the ones that just happen, the ones in which I find enjoyment in things like music or nature, often times spent within a community for a part and alone by myself for a part, where I barely interact with my phone or computer. I also find that it's so hard to feel great on those best days due to the almost frantic desire to be in the presence of my technologies as part of my existence.

I'm practicing doing things differently, and that helps. It helps to break out of old patterns of desire because sometimes those desires are connected to other things like pain or shame that are psychologically avoided for learned safety reasons. I feel that by becoming closer to nature that maybe I can become closer to myself, and that feels nice to share in words because I deeply care for nature in ways that I feel I can't describe with words alone, but words help!

So on my way to the park, I crossed the one damn intersection I need to get to the park, and of course there were multiple cars crossing the intersection. A person commented out of their window in, I presume, bemusement of my bare ass toes, and said something like "not a shoe person?" and in my deep panic and my want to say something cool and funny, I said "not today!" I think that was as honest as I could be about the question, because I like shoes, I like that they protect my feet and stuff. But I also like how the world feels through my feet. The sidewalks aren't that hard for my feet, and I will pray to the sidewalk Gods tonight for the clean paved path on my way to the hopefully safer grasses of the park.

I do think it's weird to see people barefoot in the city though, it is like a weird social thing. But it is also weird that being barefoot at all should make us feel weird as humans. It is like I almost wanted to have felt like I was purposefully being a weirdo for doing so, and I think I kind of am, but in a good way. It feels like a risk, but it's not unlike the many other risks of just living in a modern urban place.

The park was fun! I saw some squirrels chasing each other, but the instant I stopped to look and see them, as I had only first heard them scurrying recognizably around a tree, they stopped. Did they see me? Or feel my presence? Or was it just a coincidence?

They eventually keep running around, and so I chose to continue on too. The ground is QUITE DRY. That is my climate change awareness update for the day. But the ground and the varying stages of life in the grasses are a pleasant difference to the paved world. It's amazing how hard the ground is in general, but I suppose we do live on a giant rock after all.

Sidebar - I've been thinking a lot about agriculture and food lately. I recently watched Zach Galifinakis' This is a Gardening Show on Netflix and it was rather enjoyable for me. I hold a very similar sense of humor to his style, and it was just a show about agrarian related topics.

I find the idea of just becoming more aware of food, whether through gardening, education, or tending to the land (by paying attention to it and caring for it), to be a really enjoyable thing regardless of the path. There is so much to know, and it is what sustains our lives. I wish we had a better culture in general about food, but that is such a complex topic because it is our most fundamental resource, and it is a resource largely facilitated through agricultural production.

Being critical of agriculture feels really bizarre because we do depend on it, but it remains clear that our current iteration of agriculture is not good for the sustaining of life whether in practice or in biological reality. It destroys soils when done in the machine like manner that many areas use, it generates tonnes of polluted runoff that discharges to and pollutes the waters, and it is based in a system focused on maximizing profit, which may just be a primary cause for the previously mentioned problems?

Food is not money, food is food. We create a lot of it, and a lot of the ways we do it is especially wasteful. So I will digress to saying that learning about food is interesting for many reasons, and I just wish there was more ways in our urban communities to get more easily involved in things like agrarian knowledge because regardless of whatever happens to us as a human species, whether its political or climate related, we are going to have to keep doing food. I think that is something we can feel grateful to have the ability to participate in, because of the ancestral knowledge that exists and remains in tact through human social participation, meaning we don't have to just do systematized agriculture to feed humanity. We need to find other ways of relating to the land and the waters when it comes to food production. There are many ways, anthropologically speaking, that humans have learned to function socially in regards to food, so lets maybe try new (old) ways. Sidebar done.

I picked up a couple of random nuts under a tree. I got to a point of the park where I was just walking on these kinds of blunt objects where there was little grass coverage. I decided to pick them up and admire the complexity of their surfaces. The patterns and the colors.

I noticed sets of leaves laying on the ground, and I was interested in the different shades of life that they felt they had. The darker, more boldly green leaves feel more weighty and alive. They feel more fluid in their nature. The more decayed leaves are more brittle, and lifeless. Its interesting to see the resemblance of living more fluidly as a person resulting in more aliveness, and that the more brittle and fragile we feel, the more life seems to take a back seat. Nature is a mirror of us and we are also a mirror of it.

The smooth stick, the nothing and everything holder. Trees and plants are magical and have been integral to our life on this planet. We need to be more friendly to the trees and the plants, not just from an urban development perspective, but from a day to day perspective, and that connects back to how we produce food as well.

Anyways, thanks for joining me on a walk through the park. I walked home rapidly after having excitedly selected the little objects nature left for me, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them now, but it was fun while it lasted.