I went hiking at Sweetwater Creek State Park on Sunday with a clear objective: complete the hike.
This is, unfortunately, how I approach a surprising number of things that are supposed to be enjoyable.
There was a slight chance of rain. I had checked the radar. I knew the mileage. I had a plan. The creek was beautiful, but mostly as scenery for my accomplishment.
Then my friend did something deeply inconvenient.
He stopped.
Not because he was tired. Not because he was lost. He simply sat on a rock overlooking the water and took off his shoes.
I immediately began a silent legal brief against doing the same.
The case against barefoot creek sitting was overwhelming. Wet feet. Wet socks. The tedious process of unlacing and relacing hiking shoes. The possibility of slipping and spending the rest of the afternoon explaining to an urgent care physician how I had injured myself while attempting mindfulness.
As he sat there, perfectly content to do absolutely nothing productive, I found myself remembering another pair of untied shoes.
Several years ago, after one of the most painful experiences of my life, I sat in my therapist’s office trying to explain the difference between depression and grief. I told her I could still work. I could still laugh. I could still function. The problem wasn’t that life had stopped. The problem was that heartbreak had become a permanent roommate. No matter where my attention wandered, there it was.
I told her I wasn’t opposed to antidepressants. If she thought I needed them, I would take them. But I wanted her to understand that what I was experiencing felt less like illness and more like sorrow. The pain was immense, but I felt capable of being with it. What I hoped for was anything that would help me metabolize it without disconnecting me from it.
She listened carefully and then offered what remains the most unusual prescription I have ever received.
Go into the forest.
Take off your shoes.
Lie on the earth.
Let the earth hold you.
A few days later, determined to avoid being recognized while conducting what looked very much like a low-budget spiritual breakdown, I drove two hours away to a state park in another state. It was late winter, just beginning to think about spring.
I found a quiet place among the trees, unlaced my shoes, and stretched out on the forest floor.
At first I felt ridiculous.
Part of it was practical concern. Part of it was self-consciousness. Part of it was the awareness that the forest floor was not, in fact, empty. It was occupied by an entire civilization of beings with vastly different opinions about personal space.
As a child, I was always in the grass and the dirt. I handled crickets and worms and beetles with great care, the way you hold something you’ve decided is precious, and I half believed that if I was gentle enough and patient enough, they might eventually talk back. Not in the Disney-princess sense. More in the eccentric-mystic-who-befriends-a-cricket-in-Times-Square sense. I imagined developing such profound powers of attention that the cricket in my palm would one day offer me advice, and the worms would explain whatever it is worms know.
My father, a cardiologist, once gave me a pacemaker magnet, and I discovered that if I dragged it through the soil it would pull dark grains of ore up out of the earth. This gave me hours of delight. I was a boy crouched in the dirt, mining iron from the ground with a piece of medical equipment, waiting for the bugs to start talking, perfectly happy.
These days I do what I can not to harm another living thing, including insects, but I no longer go looking for intimate relationships with creatures possessing multiple legs. Or no legs, for that matter. Respectful coexistence feels like a sufficiently evolved spiritual practice.
Still, I lay there.
The ground was cool beneath me. Leaves from the previous autumn had softened into the earth after months of rain and decay. Their scent rose around me, rich and sweet. Small green shoots pushed through the brown carpet, carrying on the ancient business of becoming.
Above me were the tops of trees.
Not trunks. Not forests. Just the tops.
I remember feeling strangely small as I looked upward. Branches reached across the sky like dark veins. Wherever there wasn’t a leaf or limb, there was blue. The sky seemed to seep through every opening, pouring down through green and brown.
Nothing happened.
No revelation. No voice from heaven. No cinematic breakthrough accompanied by inspirational music.
And yet something in me softened.
The earth was not asking me to get over anything. It wasn’t asking me to improve, heal faster, gain perspective, or become a better version of myself. It simply held me. Beneath the grief, beneath the story I was telling myself about the grief, beneath all the effort required to carry it, there was ground.
The first human in Genesis is shaped from the adamah, the earth. Adam from adamah. I wasn’t thinking about any of that on the forest floor. But I had apparently driven two hours to lie down in the same stuff I’d been pulling iron out of as a boy, the same stuff I was made from. Some part of me knew the way back.
I started calling them Earth dates.
Standing at Sweetwater Creek on Sunday, years later, I realized I was once again treating an experience as a task. I was trying to finish the hike instead of receive it.
And I noticed something I would rather not have noticed: both times, it took someone else to show me how to stop. A therapist’s prescription. Now a friend’s bare feet on a rock. Left to my own devices, I would have finished the hike, logged the mileage, and driven home having seen nothing.
So I took off my shoes.
The stone beneath my feet was cool and rough. The creek moved around dark rock polished by centuries of water. The air carried the scent of rain.
The rock asked nothing of me.
The water didn’t need an update.
The trees had no feedback.
For a little while there was only cool stone, moving water, and the simple fact of standing there with nowhere else to be.
When I finally looked up, my friend was still on his rock, shoes off, watching the water. He didn’t say anything. Neither did I.
The hike could wait.
The earth and I had a date. And, as dates go, it was one of the best I’d had in a long time.
Love it!