Barefoot: A Return to Knowing
Day Three: The Remembering
She woke before dawn, the dream still clinging to her like mist. Laughter. Lightness. Wings that weren’t seen but deeply felt.
She sat up slowly, her feet sore, her legs still lined with faint scratches. But there was something different in the way her body held itself.
She pulled on a loose shirt, rolled her pants to the knees, and stepped barefoot out the door before the sun even broke the sky. For two days, no coffee.
The morning air was thick, but she breathed in anyway. Deep into her lungs. Something had definitely shifted. The land before her, though she knew it well. It knew her better. She exhaled with a step.
The dew stung at first. It was cold against the open places where briars had kissed her skin. But she kept going, past the pasture gate, along a narrow trail framed by pine. She moved slower than usual, but each step felt deliberate, like an offering to the land that had never stopped calling her.
Halfway through the path, she felt a twinge in the middle of her chest. It made her draw her hand there and pause. The smell of something sweet and damp, honeysuckle vine on wet cedar. It pulled on her, and she looked up. Remembering.
She had been no more than six, maybe seven. Running barefoot through the yard behind her grandmother’s house, her hair a wild halo in the wind. And then—she lifted.
Not jumped. Not imagined. She lifted.
It wasn’t high, just enough to feel the separation between foot and earth, suspended between sky and soil. Long enough to know it was real.
She landed laughing. Radiant. This was not the first time she took flight.
She told her grandmother. Took her by surprise, the immense joy gave into the woman’s fear. Hiding in the other room, the pastor’s son heard it all.
Two days later, she was brought to the altar. Hands pressed to her head. Oil smeared across her brow. Words like protect her, ground her, deliver her spoken in hushed panic.
And when it was over, someone handed her a pair of shoes. New ones. White. Stiff. Buckled tight.
“You need to be more careful now,” her grandmother said. Your feet must stay on the ground.”
The memory hit her full force. She doubled over from the weight of the forgetting. Of what had been stolen in the name of protection. Of what she’d agreed to leave behind in exchange for belonging.
She let herself cry. There, in the middle of the trail, barefoot and thirty years older, she wept not just for herself, but for every child who had been talked out of their magic.
Then suddenly, the wind rushed all around her, delighting her in song. Before she knew it, she rose, spread her arms wide and she danced. Not gracefully. Not carefully. But truly with the wind that carries the seeds of each and every inner knowing. She felt transformed, renewed like Spring.
Her feet slapped the earth in rhythm. Her hips swayed. Her arms moved like they remembered something her mind had long let go. The ground was no longer a test. It was a drum. And she was keeping time with something only she and the earth could share. It was intense. It was beautiful. It was sacred.
She danced until her breath became short and her heart beat wild, until the tears dried and her skin shone with sweat. She didn’t need anyone to see it. She didn’t need it to prove anything. She just needed to move. To answer her body’s call with motion, and to let the earth and the sky know she remembers.
That night, she dreamed of a moonlit field. Children ran barefoot in wide, laughing circles, joy written across every inch of them. They weren’t pretending. They weren’t asking permission. Their souls carried stories that had never been broken.
One of the little girls turned to her. She didn’t speak, she just nodded with a vibrant smile.
Then the wind returned and wrapped around her legs. Her ribs. Her shoulders. And lifted her high into clouds and as she soared the remembrance came - the ability is found in the oneness of all that is and who she is - not in her ability to fly.
AWESOME! So enjoyable to feel through the progression! I love this!