Bare Earth, Bare Feet, Bare Soul

“There is a considerable difference between walking on the beach with shoes on”, he said, “and walking with shoes off. The latter enhances the spiritual feeling.” I was listening to a radio interview with a gentleman who runs a charter boat in Fiordland. He didn’t want to get too explicit about what he meant by spiritual, and acknowledged that many people would pooh-pooh the idea. He concluded, “When you walk barefoot, with an open heart, on a beach or in the bush, something happens to your spirit.”

I’m reminded of Moses’ experience in Exodus chapter three. Confronted with the power of the extraordinary and mysterious he felt compelled to remove his shoes. The baring of his feet mirrored the baring of his soul. It symbolized removing a layer of protection, thereby increasing his vulnerability. Receptivity to the spiritual often involves a degree of vulnerability.

Vulnerability however did not inhibit Moses from disagreeing with the Divine. Vulnerability is not submission but the willingness to meet the metaphysical stranger. Sometimes we wrestle with and are wounded by this stranger, this God-of-the-mist. Sometimes we greet the stranger as the breaking dawn. Otherness can be both threatening and redemptive.

As I listened to the radio I mused about those experiences where the spiritual power embedded in the earth penetrates through protective layers into our very souls. I thought about the smell of dripping Urewera bush, the tingling sands of Bethell’s beach, the crescendo of crashing West Coast waves, and the song of a joyous Tui dipping its head into flax nectar. The power of smell, sight and sound mingles with mystery, vastness, and beauty. Indefinable heaven touches our earthly feelings, if we let it.

These spiritual feelings, these exchanges between heaven and earth, are not just about nature giving and we receiving. We are invited to participate, to enter into the wonder and magic of this power, and even into its longing and pain. This spiritual interaction can be thought of as a song. But the universe doesn’t sing and we passively listen, nor is it an invitation to blend into a celestial chorale. Rather we are invited, like with a jazz ensemble, to improvise in our own creative way.

There is, like with Moses, a call to us. The spirit song is not passive, detached from the potency and sufferings of planet earth. It calls firstly to the pain within us. The gentleman in the radio interview spoke of clients breaking down in tears. The spiritual power reaches out to us and we can feel both our alienation from it and our yearning for it. Sorrow and hope combine like a love song.

Secondly, the song calls to our power. It calls to that determination within us not to be overwhelmed by the demands of the dollar, the pressure of performance, and the commitments of family and community. It calls to that fighting spirit lodged in each of us – a spirit that longs to see harmony restored in and between people, and between the planet and its population.

Lastly, the song calls us to transcend our own needs for the needs of the whole. There is a piece of countercultural Jesus Zen that goes: ‘To find yourself you must lose yourself.’ We are reticent to lose ourselves, especially when so much of our Western world is geared to improving and fulfilling ourselves. We are reluctant to let go of what we want in order to consider the wants of all. Yet the paradox is that by transcending our personal desires we actually find the fulfilment we wanted all along. Unless more of us begin to care about the whole the world will go to pieces.

We begin by travelling to a place apart, taking off our shoes, feeling the vulnerability of both ourselves and the earth, listening for the call of the spirit song, and then wrestling with its meaning. Bare earth, bare feet, bare soul.