Feet on cork, heart in hand, facing forward

My friend J really loves to crawl into a tightly tucked bed and kick her feet gleefully free of the covers. She's generally a serious kind of person, that J, so mindful, so I love that image of her fluttering madly under the sheets, unfettered and delighted.

I get that. My version is the sound that my bare feet make when they slap the cork floors in my loft gently. There's an infinitesimal stickiness, a little suctiony noise, a little tiny thwack, a momentary caress between flesh and warm surface that is oddly grounding, distractingly meditative. It's this aural focal point, a pointer to a profound, quiet, listening-to-your-belly space.

I find this space in my loft, alone, especially when I've come home from somewhere. I haven't been home much lately -- Windsor, then Montreal, then California, then several days in ROC. Leaving again on Thursday. But when I'm suddenly, quietly, alone here, I can find a sort of suspended time, a chamber of heightened senses. Like in the quiet padding around, slap slap slapping in a whisper on my floors, I can hear things through the palimpsest of history, stories, stuck patterns, for the underneath, the elemental desire or need.

The most powerful sense memory of this was the night I arrived home from my time in Portland last spring. I got home, late, quietly alone after a long traveling day, the calm space of this flat open on a saturday night, humid hectic early summer toronto pulsing outside. I put some Josh Ritter on my itunes -- the quieter thoughtful stuff -- and walked around, barefoot, eating raspberry gelato out of the freezer, bite by bite off a big spoon. I felt simultaneously calmer, more poised, more awake,more full of possibilities, more infused with a kind of emotional chlorophyll than I'd ever remembered feeling -- simultaneously deeply satisfied and deeply yearning for something more. I was alive with having been in a west coast city that deeply suited me, able to write some important things, unfolding into a rich correspondence with F that had led to a decision to meet a week later, a connection I never could fully open myself up to until I was fully alone in Portland. All of these folded together, my feet in tactile contact with my floor.

I've lived here almost a year now. It's a rich space, open and forgiving. Warm, silent, space for the slap of my feet, listening to everything that I know how to hear. It doesn't feel like a permanent space -- just one to grow in, quiet grounding, knowing who I am at my most elemental, disheveled and joyful and *awake*. My most loving and strong.

I was reading a series of emails from three years ago, and I find it hard to find myself in those words, sometimes. Articulate, held together, so certain. Now I find myself rarely certain... but confident, knowing, feeling sure through my body right to the palpable contact of foot on floor.