Weekly Photo Challenge: Beneath Your Feet

“Beneath Your Feet” is the theme for the Weekly Photo Challenge to start off the month of August.  I do lots of walking, in the park or elsewhere in nature for preference, but at my part time job as a tea-rista, I spend almost 9 hours a day, two days week, on my feet.  Consequently, I’m quite aware of what’s beneath my feet.

Go outside. Don’t tell anyone and don’t bring your phone. Start walking and keep walking until you no longer know the road like the palm of your hand, because we walk the same roads day in and day out, to the bus and back home and we cease to see. We walk in our sleep and teach our muscles to work without thinking and I dare you to walk where you have not yet walked and I dare you to notice. Don’t try to get anything out of it, because you won’t. Don’t try to make use of it, because you can’t. And that’s the point. Just walk, see, sit down if you like. And be. Just be, whatever you are with whatever you have, and realise that that is enough to be happy.
There’s a whole world out there, right outside your window. You’d be a fool to miss it.
  ~Charlotte Eriksson

This first shot is a photo of a interruption by nature of the pavement beneath my feet as I walk around the small lake near our house.  By turning the phone upside down while getting as low as possible, I got a much more interesting angle than simply from above.

“Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors…disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.”
~Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust:  A History of Walking

Walking in sand is good exercise; sometimes very difficult exercise, especially if that sand is loose.  The sand on this California beach was quite firm, but someone had managed to leave a partial print there that we discovered while enjoying the ocean.

“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”
~John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir