A Barefooted Walk

Written for the April edition of the Good Shepherd Volunteer's Blog: http://justlovegsv.blogspot.com/

In Exodus, God calls to Moses from the middle of the burning bush at Mount Sinai saying, “Take off your shoes, for the place on which you stand is holy ground.” Every day we are called to cast aside the things that keep us from recognizing the holiness of the ground on which we currently stand. We are called to take off our shoes of judgment, impatience, and anxiety. We are called to remove our shoes of distraction, discrimination, and haste. Or more simply, we may be literally called to just take off our physical shoes – to feel our soles hit the newly thawed ground or our toes to feel each blissful blade of grass that slowly springs its way into view – in order to recall the glorious mystery and wonder of the world in which we live.

In Thailand, it is customary to take off shoes before entering any home, store, or similar location. Thai people believe that the foot is not only physically the lowest part of the body but also symbolically the lowest, dirtiest part of the human body. Therefore, Thais remove their shoes in order to preserve the physical and metaphorical tidiness of the space. In the eight-months I have been in Nong Khai, I have probably been barefoot for about 75 percent of my stay. While the act of removing shoes in Thailand may be to protect the cleanliness of a home, in many ways it is also about respecting the space and those that live in it – thereby acknowledging the holiness of the place and those who dwell within.

It was in reading Macrina Wiederkehr’s book “Seasons of Your Heart: Prayers and Meditations” that I began to dwell on this idea of taking off your shoes in life to celebrate the sacredness of each moment, place, and person and treasuring the fact that time and space are holy. After reading this collection of prayers and meditations, I tried to make physically taking off my shoes a time to reflect on the innate sacredness of the place and interactions into which I was about to enter. While I probably forgot to do this more than half the time I took off my shoes, the act of trying to center myself into the present moment and being completely aware of the people around me made me cherish more my everyday exchanges. In a generation plagued by self-seeking social media posts, that I shamefully cannot exempt myself from, we forget that some of the most precious moments in life are driving silently with a best friend on a seemingly endless highway or cooking and sharing a meal with your family. However, “driving on a long road in silence with my right-hand man” or “spaghetti with the fam” isn’t really the “like” worthy statuses we carefully craft before updating Facebook. However, I think it is important to remember that the Last Supper was a simple meal between friends, not an extravagant feast fit for a king. It was ordinary just like some of the most meaningful events of our life that help us to form a sense of kinship with those around us.

In my time in Nong Khai, some of my favorite moments have been dinner conversations with my community members at our little wooden kitchen table, playing soccer with the kids that live in the Garden of Friendship, listening to music outside of one of the family homes in the compound, sitting with the patients I work with in the covered sala in the afternoons, learning how to cook Thai food with my coworker Bon, having the kids that live in the Garden come to the volunteer house on Sundays to do an activity, and bringing the older girls to the market every Friday to go grocery shopping. All of these are normal, everyday interactions – but it is the everyday that is what we most often remember and miss when it is gone. There is holiness in ordinary. The ordinary helps to cement a walk with others – another use of our barefooted feet.

The call to service is the call to walk alongside others. However, this walk is not a one-way street. We are called to be both healers and to be healed. In order to embrace the wounded, we need to embrace our own wounds. This walk of ours is always mutual. Child psychologist Alice Miller says we are called to be “enlightened witnesses” in that through “kindness, tenderness, and attentive love we return people to themselves and in turn we too are returned to ourselves.” As we walk with others, allowing them to unapologetically be themselves, we too allow ourselves to become more of who we truly are. I can find peace in the fact that walking in compassionate companionship with someone is less about how much of ourselves we leave with that person and more about how much we facilitate that person to be utterly his or herself.

As a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, healthy, Caucasian, college-educated American female from a middle-class family working in the poorest area of Thailand known for it’s agriculture and rice production with individuals with HIV, many of whom have never finished elementary school and who have been previously homeless, one might think: how can kinship and community be formed when there are so many differences culturally, ethnically, socioeconomically, educationally, and medically? The answer is simple in theory but harder in practice – understanding, compassion, gentleness, and thoughtfulness. More simply, the answer is exactly the motto of Good Shepherd Volunteers – “Just Love”. My job everyday, as is all of ours, is to just love. In coming to Thailand, I did not volunteer to change the world (thank God – talk about a huge responsibility), but simply to love all those that I come in contact with to the best of my abilities. Sometimes that is harder than others but other days it seems like the easiest job responsibility in the world – like when one of my patients Kreauwan grabs my hand whenever I sit next to her and she just holds it or when I watch Si, a patient that was paralyzed when I came to the Care Center that I fed every day for five month, as she now feeds herself.

While my Thai language skills are pretty good at the moment, I relied on universals, such as sharing smiles, laughs, tears, hugs, playful pokes, and holding hands, to help start building kinship and community with those that I live in Nong Khai. The effect was, by appealing to the things that did not make us “other”, uniting us across country, culture, age, sex, and education levels. Because of the close bonds I have formed in the patients with which I work, my coworkers, and the families and children that live in the Garden of Friendship, I often forget about the nature of my minority “otherness”. It is not until I ride into the village and groups of children start yelling “foreigner” in Thai at me that I remember. However, I think this speaks to the level of mutuality that has occurred in forming community in that in letting those around me be themselves just by loving them, I have been able to develop more into myself in a way that I am completely comfortable in the community that I forget about all the ways that we are actually “different”.

If there is one thing that I have learned in Thailand is that people are people no matter where you go. As a man at a patient’s funeral, who had never seen a white woman before, told me – “we may look differently, but our eyes produce the same tears and our mouth produces the same smiles.” It is a shame however, that so often it is the outward, visible differences that prevent one another from seeing just how similar we all are at the core – even a 23-year old Irish step dancing, Psychology degree holding, American and a 31-year old music loving, flower loving Thai woman who happens to be HIV+ and a former prostitute. Because all we really all want to be in life is loved and understood. We can all understand that. But sometimes even on our walk with another, we forget about that the ground we stand on is holy because we cannot see that the ground of our being is holy. Sometimes we need other people to show us our own holiness. The 14th Century poet Hafiz writes:

“Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them,

"Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud;

Otherwise,

Someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this,

This great pull in us

To connect.

Why not become the one

Who lives with a full moon in each eye

That is always saying,