Day 8 - Making Love

In Star Trek, Spock and his cohorts could travel great (and not so great) distances by stepping into the transporter to be dematerialized--turned into energy--and sent somewhere else where they would rematerialize and go about their merry way without the burden of having to deal with boarding passes and limited leg room and too-small bags of peanuts and boring footage of spaceships taking off and landing.

Something similar happened to me when I was walking on the beach. 

I turned into energy. 

I was minding my own business, looking for things to take pictures of, when I walked in someone else's footprints. My feet were bare, and I was near the water's edge, and so the tracks I walked in were already washing away, but they were deep and present enough for me to see heel digs and all five toes, and that the owner of the feet had been walking away from the very lighthouse I was headed toward. So, in essence, as I walked on these footprints, I was traveling both forward and backward.

Here's the wild part. Something happened energetically as soon as I walked on the other person's tracks that made me look away from the sea's horizon to my feet: I felt a rush of energy--not a violent, hair-raising rush, but a pulling awareness, as if my whole self had been lightly vacuumed from bottom to top. I didn't know if I liked the feeling or not. It was like the first time someone touched the tip of my tongue with the tip of theirs. It was sickening or wonderful, and maybe both at once.  

So I kept doing it, walking in the footsteps. It sort of felt like stealing. I didn't turn around to see if the person who had left the prints was still in view. His or her energy was now in me, and I thought it might be better to have the energy be clear of my judgements. 

After a bit, I experimented with other people's tracks. I got bold and stepped into the footprints of a man who walked past me. I half expected him to turn around and yell at me. Couldn't he feel the pull? Didn't he see that I was stepping on his flow? Would he like that I was that close to him or would he be angry? 

Remember when you were a kid and you first played with magnets and there was the phenomenom of pushback when you held two magnets so their opposite poles almost touched but wouldn't?  All you had to do was flip one magnet to other side and boom! The magnets clicked. Where had all that resistance gone?

I felt an energetic resistance when I stepped with awareness into other people's footprints in the sand. It was slight, but it was there, and I had to fight it to keep my foot moving so my footprint sank into the footprint that had been their first. The payback once my track met the other was a different kind of energy, more embracing, but it was all so strange because there I was on the beach, having a relationship with tracks.

Once time I went to the carwash and took the cheaper option of staying in my Miata while it went through the wild wash. At the end, after all the beatings and sprayings and blinking lights, five or six people swarmed over my little car with rags to dry it. Men and women were rubbing the sides, the windows, the wheels. I felt like I was having sex. I was smiling like a lunatic and I was sharply embarrassed because my feelings seemed so inappropriate. These hard-working Classic Car Wash folks were just trying to dry my exterior, and I was losing my mind.

As exciting as all that was, now I always hand over my keys at the carwash. So much intimacy with so many strangers was borderline unbearable. I couldn't tell if the magnet that is my body was pushing or pulling. Did I want those people all over my car or didn't I? Do I want to walk in someone else's footprints or don't I?

They say you get to know someone by walking a mile in her shoes, but what happens when you walk a mile in her tracks? Are you dematerialized? And if we leave our energy in the tracks of where we have been, what is our energy like on the ground we currently occupy? Can we ourselves feel the rush of feet on ground? 

Where have we been? Where have we taken others? 

What if every step we take is a way of making love?

What if gratitude leaves footprints? 

What then?