Noticing Shoes
By guest Roy Salmond*
People often ask me where I come up with ideas for my blog every week. I tell them, “They’re all around me.”
The late poet Mary Oliver wrote: “If you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more.”
One of the wonderful by-products of my blog Between The Notes is my acquired practice of noticing. I’ve found that if I’m faithful to this practice, the practice is faithful to me.
Almost everything I experience, from minutiae to magnificence, offers space for subjectivity and story, curiosity and compassion.
Recently, a friend of mine intuited this kind of engaged noticing by referencing the Old Testament dictum, ‘Take off your shoes… this is Holy Ground.’
With my shoeless feet on life’s terra firma, I can sense the sacredness of everyday moments that change my perspective, and importantly, change me.
A word whispers beyond the constraints of ‘secular/sacred, physical/spiritual, body/soul,’
Meanings beyond what I take for granted.
Illumination in places I’ve not yet seen.
To notice ideas, ideals, and heartfelt humanity that exceeds my familiar, providing new eyes to see and new ears to hear.
Elisabeth Barrett Browning wrote,
“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes;
The rest sit around it and pluck blackberries.”
I’m prodded daily to either take off my shoes or pluck blackberries. Nothing wrong with blackberries, but plucking them without shoes is a prickly proposition.
The shoes protect me, but they also inure me to my visceral connection to the ground beneath me, and the path before me.
And so it goes I notice more and more if I’m wearing shoes.
Or not.
Photo Credit - ‘On Holy Ground’ sculpture by David Robinson, www.davidrobinsonstudio.com
*Roy is a record producer, working out of his studio Whitewater Productions in Vancouver Canada. He’s also a podcast co-host (family360podcast.com), speaker and writer, penning the weekly arts and faith blog:Between The Notes (this article was originally published there). Roy Salmond is a City in Focus associate.