Take off those fancy high heels,
The ones that cause your back to ache.
Forget your pretty pedicure;
Don’t worry for goodness sake!
Don’t think of that to-do list,
It’ll be there when you get back.
It’s time to just remind yourself
Of one of the simple joys you lack.
Now find yourself some good ol’ dirt,
Even a little patch will do.
And then turn on that garden hose
Until the dirt turns into goo.
Don’t be shy and try to dip
Just the tip of your big toe.
Get in there and muck it up,
Until it squishes. There you go!
Just squish and squash and step and stomp,
Yes, let your mind run free.
Empty your head of all your stress
And then fill it with childhood glee.
With mud up to your ankles now,
And mud between your toes,
It’s time to rinse it all away
With that handy garden hose.
So now you see pink nails again,
And some stress comes creeping back,
But at least you had fun reminding yourself
Of one of the simple joys you lack.
Notes about this poem:
So it had been super dry here in Ohio and our garden was hard as a rock. Our grass was brown and hurt to walk on with bare feet. I had a to-do list a mile long, but I had to water the poor garden. I was going down the rows in my flip-flops. Once the ground got a little wet, though, my flip-flops kept slipping around and getting stuck. I finally decided it would be easier to just be barefoot, so I kicked them off. Then I realized how good it feels to just sink your toes into some good, soft mud. It brought back memories of doing it as a kid and made me forget my stress. After that moment of fun, I finished watering the garden, rinsed off my feet, went inside and worked on my to-do list again. This is why I love my garden. It forces me to get away from all the technology, multi-tasking, pointless reality TV shows, and drama. To just be outside. To just be. I’m telling you, it’s therapeutic.
The title is from one of my favorite childhood books, Small Pig. In it, Small Pig likes to “sit down and sink down into the good, soft mud.” Then the farmer’s wife goes on a cleaning binge and cleans up all of his mud. He gets so mad that he runs away from home in search of some mud. He tries a swamp, but the animals there are mean to him. He tries a junkyard, but sees a scary old vacuum and runs away (a vacuum sucked up his favorite mud). Finally, he finds some mud in the city, but it turns out to be wet cement, so he draws a huge crowd and has to be rescued. The farmer and his wife find him and apologize. It rains on the way home and he gets new, soft mud. The wife promises never to clean it up again. Moral of the story: Don’t clean too much or bad things will happen! Ha! So sinking into some good, soft mud has all kinds of childhood nostalgia attached to it for me.
Even if you are high-maintenance and could never imagine purposely getting your feet dirty, you should try it sometime. It really is relaxing, I promise. Heck, on The Bachelorette recently, Ashley and Ben jumped into a pond-thing full of “healing” mud and rubbed it all over each other. They considered it romantic. I’ve also played ultimate Frisbee in the mud and it was pretty fun. There’s mud volleyball, “muddin’” on four-wheelers and in trucks, mud masks, you name it. So the next time you feel a little stressed, why not try sinking down into the good, soft mud?