Did you know that August 6th is considered Wiggle Your Toes Day?  I just discovered this important holiday and will celebrate it in grand style:)  Lest we take these 10 little appendages for granted, imagine what it would be like it we didn’t have them.  Our feet are our foundation that keep us grounded, that help us to move through our lives, on which we get to wear fun and funky shoes. Often we neglect them and when we do, they let us know.

My relationship with my tootsies began in childhood with the profound poem “This Little Piggie”  (how DID they ever come to share the name with the pink porcine critter?) that my parents would recite.  As my dietary habits changed over the years, when my son was little, we morphed the words to “This little piggie had tofu…” which he translated as ‘toe food’.   When I was a child, I visited a podiatrist, because I was pigeon toed and flat footed and had to don clunky, awkward orthopedic shoes and needed to forgo the penny loafers and sneakers that many of my friends got to wear. A trade off was that I got to do fun foot exercises. I have fond memories of walking on tiptoe to strengthen my arches, picking things up with my toes (I’m still quite adept) and each morning, my mom and I would lie in bed and draw alphabet letters with our feet. Within a few years, I was able to make a respectable arch imprint on the concrete after emerging from the pool and could wear whatever type of shoes I wanted. One of the perks of toeing in, was that as a competitve swimmer, I was excellent at butterfly which requires an inward rotation of the feet.

Some marvelous metatarsal meanderings for your piggies’ pleasure:

Walk barefoot in the grass, feeling the cool blades caressing your skin.

Dig your toes into warm sand, noticing the grains sliding between them.

Experience a pedicure and paint your toenails wondrously wild colors.

Puddle splash.

Plant your feet on a yoga mat, rooting yourself to the ground, feeling the energy of Gaia rising up from beneath them.

Receive a foot massahhhhhge and hear your toes sighing.

Draw fun faces on the underside of your toes and have them talk to each other.

Do a foot puppet show.

Wear shoes or slippers that comfort your feet.

Toe wrestle with a friend.

Don colorful socks (I sometimes wear two different socks whose buddies hang out at home in the meantime:)

Dance to music that only you can hear.

Tickle your toes.

Have a conversation with your feet, asking them what they need and telling them how much you appreciate them.

Draw alphabet letters with your feet and pick things up with your toes…I promise, it really isn’t as weird as it sounds.

Read the Dr. Seuss classic The Foot Book

Enjoy these foot-quotes…

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
Henry David Thoreau

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
Khalil Gibran

Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.
Theodore Roosevelt

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.
Dr. Seuss

http://youtu.be/bD_1ATjDxAU  Norah Jones “Toes”