Wanderlustress: To Follow My Feet

Tonight I learned the reason why I have wide, flat, peasant feet. It’s because my maternal grandmother was from Isan, the northeastern region of Thailand. Isan is predominantly agrarian, and everyone there is poor. It is the picture perfect postcard photo of women bent over, knee deep in mud, tending the terraced rice paddies fringed by swaying palm trees, under the background of hazy rolling hills. Isan was the last place my aristocratic Lopburi great-grandmother would have wanted her second son to select a wife, which also explained why my mother had been so abused by that family. She was the polluted bloodline, and she passed that peasant blood on down to me, straight down to my feet.

My feet have been horrible and totally ill suited for the life that I’ve led. They are not only flat, but are flanked by bunions so big the right one is often mistaken for a sixth toe. And because they are so heavily calloused, I really don’t need to, and probably should never wear shoes. While every ounce of my heritage was expecting me to wake up before the sun in a thatched-roof hut with its cool, smooth bamboo mat floors, and walk out into the soft muddy fields, I was squeezing the painful breadth of my feet into stiff penny loafers, tennis whites, leather boots, high-heeled corporate pumps, and even slinky CFM stilettos.

All my life, I was really meant to be wading in the rice fields. Perhaps that is why my life has culminated in an opportunity to be, literally, “out in the field”. My feet are taking me away from painful materialistic confinements and into a world where they will feel more “at home.”

Comments

Caroline Myss (intuitive healer, writer of many books) says "Biology is Biography" Sounds like this is true of you and your feet.
Oh to spend one hour (not one lifetime) knee deep in mud and water bent over a rice paddie!

Posted by: Mahala | 10/09/2003 at 05:31 AM