For the largest part of my life, should I live to be eighty, I will have run barefoot, with the exception of taking part in some school, work, and social activities—those more formal occasions—and entering the establishments perennially posted NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT SHIRT AND SHOES. As a youngster on Atlantic bay waters, crewing on small catboats, I pressed salty toes against a centerboard trunk, using the broader lid as a toe stopper, a bracing that with the boat's heeling allowed me to hike out and over the side until I often could view the centerboard itself rising from the water. On the West Coast, beginning at fourteen, I roamed shoeless the cornfields and arroyos of the San Fernando Valley as well as Southern California's coastal tide pools, baked beaches, long wooden piers.
       Such a shoe-free penchant was not without its perils. I endured the seasonal stickers and thorns, the splinters, deep glass cuts, and frequently broken toes from stubbings on roots and stones. From March through November, the soles of my feet toughened like a street urchin's to the thickness of shoe leather. It would be New Year's before I began to molt, sloughing calluses turned soft by confinement in socks and shoes, winter's hot baths bringing on the final disintegration into sorts of rubbery crumbles, resembling detritus shed from art gum erasers. I was always a little tender of foot for the first few weeks of spring, but come June, blazing asphalt again posed no challenge.
        When continuing education drew me north to Berkeley and San Francisco, I stole away from the concrete, tile, and linoleum surfaces at every opportunity, my soul aching for a closeness with dirt, pebbles, rocks—weeds caught between my toes!—those most sensual and tactile basics of walking barefoot across ground. The surest way I knew of accomplishing this was to streak for the San Joaquin Valley and there wiggle my feet into the fertile, sandy soil until buried to the arches. It would be evening by the time I reached the flatland farms, their thick, heady smells of livestock and maturing crops intermingling all along the miles to the little town of Livingston. There, old family friends owned a dairy farm and vineyard. Mornings, I was out early and into the cool, damp grass alongside the guest cottage, then a stroll down a narrow lane of compacted sand, bordered by the gnarled trunks of grape, to the farm house kitchen—the most lived-in room of a house built of large, hand-cast bricks. The final foot-sensation of my free-soled morning sojourn came curiously from a chilly slab of concrete. I minded it little as the four-foot-square stoop at the back screen door.
        Valleys to mountains. One summer, I hiked the connecting trails around Northern California's Mount Lassen with my feet clad only in wool socks, which after a few miles grew at heel and toe pleasingly holey. This once, I'd had every intention of going shod, but over the course of the first day, the newness of a pair of tennis shoes raised watery blisters on both heels. Socks afforded my insteps a measure of protection against emerging points of rocks and tough crooks of roots, in turn allowing me welcome ganders at the surrounding landscape beyond the intent business of selecting the next patch of path for a footfall.
        Ensuing years brought me riverbanks, those of white-water rafting trips—terrain where my heels and toes communed in their own weird rituals with smooth, water-tumbled stones, bee stings, caked sand.
        Then my shoeless life came suddenly to an end, as I traded rafts for horses. In working with the big drafts, one is inclined to don boots of leather, the thicker the better. I had heard about a horse stepping on a woman's bare foot. The hoof, freshly trimmed by a horseshoer, severed three of her toes.
        Horses are not all that keep me shod these days. Snow and ice and fifty-below windchills, barreling like double-trailered Peterbilts through a Rocky Mountain valley, and the frigid floors of the old dairy barn I call home collectively drive me into serious footwear: felt-lined winter pacs, Polar-fleece socks, cork-soled slippers of boiled wool. And then there's my podiatrist, whose assessments I've come to hate! Old, he says, I'm getting old; arches dropping; bone spurs started; orthotics required to relieve pain. The likes of duct tape will be needed to bind the $250 items to bare feet or summer sandals. My future, it seems, will brim with walking shoes, hiking boots, clodhopper beachwear, oxford bedroom slippers.
        Freedom and convenience and high fashion aside, this encasement in footwear robs me most of connection, that instantaneous feel of how I'm woven into the grand scheme of the planet. When shoeless, one cavorts intimately with Earth's textures, its temperatures, its levels of moisture. One is party to sensations that are the makeup of Earth's personality: searing sting of nettles, soothing ooze of mud. Earth's history is imbued in its surface, and in padding along upon it, one absorbs the ages, makes them undeniably one's own: polished hardpan, volcanic ash, hayfield stubble, razorback rock chips, springy green shoots, spongy deadfall, brittle fallen leaf and twig. Shoeless, I yield to the earth's insistence, encounter it smack-on, not as a thing postponable.
        Feet to earth, I am forced to remain mindful and attentive. It is I who adjusts to the ground, requiring of it in my passing no grandiose transformation for self-comfort, or whim. A close and hearty relationship develops—of earth and person—one that fosters in me vulnerability and humility, a ladder down off the towering human pinnacle of arrogance.
        Naked soles and dexterous toes long served me a route into sisterhood with the planet's greater community of wildlife, as well as animated dialogue with plants and rocks. I can't help thinking that what the feet for all those years took for granted, the heart—in my present manner of living—now seeks. However blindly it began, without linear progression or startling forethought, in a kind of slow, absentminded aligning, the way a barometer might rearrange itself to a change in atmospheric pressure, oblivious to whip of prevailing wind, my preciously felt connection with Earth has swung round from foot-bottom to bosom.
        Yet in transcending footwear there is no perfection. Feet are sensory appendages, while the heart has a mind of its own. The heart is a fickle organ, disposed toward standing in the way of plain sense, taking when it should be giving. Mine and yours are on a path—we can hope—a path similar to the one the author Nathaniel Branden sought to teach in his book The Psychology of Romantic Love, from that of immature love to healthy love. It is very much a relationship and a romance that we humans have with Earth, replete with love and hate and who—by God!—will be in control.
        As a species so in need of a means of balance, we could do worse than stand to with our toes in the dirt, run the straightaways, the grades, the bends of our big race, hearts barefooted.