Shoes

It should be Blue Monday in the blog, but who could be blue at the beginning of Spring Break?! My kids' spring breaks coincide this year, and my son is coming home from college on the train today. In full Random Coinciday fashion, he ran into my daughter on Michigan Avenue yesterday in Chicago, where she is beginning her spring break by doing fun things with her boyfriend's family. Today I expect my daughter to run into my friend Kim and her daughter who are up there doing fun things, too!  I am dog sitting a dog named Wolf.

But I'm here to tell you about shoes. These are the shoes on I put on (Facebook) for St. Patrick's Day and the coming of spring.

On Friday, the local college students, just returned from their Spring Break, walked a day without shoes to raise money and collect donations for people in Japan.

The third annual One Day Without Shoes is coming up April 8, as you can read here, an event that raises awareness for barefoot children in developing nations, sponsored by TOMS Shoes.  You can also find a walk, to fund raise for particular causes, here, at Take the Walk, if you are someone with money for nice shoes who also wants to do a good deed.

And you may be particularly interested in Take a Walk in Her Shoes, an event in which men stand up for women and against sexual violence by taking a walk in high heels.

We've been discussing the book To Kill a Mockingbird in our house, with the poignant advice from Atticus to his daughter Scout, about not really knowing someone until you take a walk in his shoes, as my daughter wanted to finish up a paper on it before Spring Break!

And what started me on today's shoe focus was this wonderful poem, "Converse," by Hannah Stephenson at The Storialist, where she posts poems inspired by images.  Read the poem, and then click the title/image under the poem's title to see what inspired her.  I tracked down the OSU Urban Arts Space performance piece in order to "Like" it at Facebook, where you can see additional marvelous images. And here is the OSU Urban Arts Space's page for the piece, Domestic Matters: A Performing Installation!

May you walk barefoot in joy and empathy, or shod with the shoes of your choice (or your charity), and may your path be the one that takes you where you need to go.