I keep my feet outside my hammock. I’m trying to keep one place sacred; just one place where the grime of the outside world cannot reach. There are few of those places left.
My feet are always dirty. My clothes smell slightly musty, I sweat continuously and I have lost count of the bug bites. Somehow ants continue to find their way into my backpack and I have a new five second rule: if you can get the bug off your food within five seconds of spotting it, it’s okay to keep eating. The struggle is real.
But the struggle is only physical. Because as I sit with sweat rolling down my back, watching an ant scurry up my leg, I feel so deeply how I am supposed to be right where I am. I feel how my body was meant to work until my bones ache. I feel how my feet crave being bare in the grass and the soil. Mostly, I feel the way my soul thrives on the ever changing nature of this community. You can’t trade clean clothes and warm showers for something like that. My feet may be dirty but my spirit is full.
There is something that happens when you are living in fullness; when you hike through mountain tops to help someone you’ve never met tend their garden; when you make friends through smiles and laughter because you have no words to speak to them; when you come together with a family to help a little deaf boy hear; there is something that happens when you are living in fullness. You come alive.
