To plant a foot firmly on earth—that is the ultimate achievement, and a far
later stage of growth than anything begun in your head. We grow down, and
we need a long life to get on our feet.

—James Hillman (2017, pp.42-43)

One of the great mysteries of the body is how the feet, though constituting only
3 percent of the body’s weight, support 97 percent of that weight. Not only do
they balance our weight in standing but, through the complex and dynamic liv-
ing interactions of the bones, ligaments, tendons, and muscles, they allow us to
walk, to run, to jump, and to dance.

To connect with the feet, to our souls and soles, let’s start by dancing. The
joy that we embody as our feet rhythmically strike the body of the earth is the
essence of our earliest celebrations, our ceremonies, even our communications.

Various kinds of foot re-soundings upon the earth play a role in all cultures
—Native American stomp dance, flamenco dance from Spain, Bharatanatyam
from Asia, and Masai jumping from Africa, to mention a very few.

Of course, many animals use their feet in mating and in communication.
Elephants use foot-stomping and vocal rumblings as part of seismic communi-
cation, sending vibrations underground to other elephants far below our level of
audible sound; distant elephants “hear” those signals with their highly sensitive
feet. It is, therefore, no exaggeration to think of the foot as a kind of eardrum
and the body of the earth as a transmitting medium.

The foot is first of all a sense organ, later acquiring a motor function. In “civ-
ilization,” constantly shoed, we have limited our ability to dance and certainly
to listen with our feet! It is time to hear what our soles and souls have to tell us.

‘As we explore the feet, let’s always remember that bones are alive—nour-
ished by blood, connected through nerves, and floating, as do all the body’s
parts, in the 60 percent ocean water that we are. They shrink or grow according
to the vicissitudes of movement, age, or physiological state. The bones “listen”
to how we use or misuse them, and they talk back!

The variety of the communications and celebrations issuing from and
through the feet depends on their miraculous ability to support the entire
body’s weight through arches. In architecture, an arch is a curved opening in a
structure designed to distribute weight. Arches are used in large buildings be-
cause they can support a very large mass.

Arches are essentially domes—adorning the tops of churches, mosques, and
synagogues. We can imagine these living domes as adorning each of the di-
aphragmatic structures of the human body—pelvic, respiratory, thoracic,
palate, and skull. This organic arrangement of anatomical domes begins with
the feet.

The foot has three arches: medial longitudinal, lateral longitudinal, and
transverse. The arches provide the foot with the stiffness it needs to act as a
lever, transmitting the forces generated by the leg muscles as they push against
the ground. At the same time, the arches allow for sufficient flexibility to func-
tion like springs, storing and then releasing mechanical energy.

The keystones of the foot’s transverse arch are three bones known as the me-
dial, intermediate, and lateral cuneiforms. Cuneiform comes from the Latin for
wedge. The earliest form of written communications, traced back to the
Sumerians in the fourth millennium bce, utilized cuneiform, or wedge-shaped
characters.

So, what the feet, and the cuneiforms especially, have to tell us is “written,”
is shared, in the same shapes as the first written script. Imagine the bones of our
feet pressing into the ground, into the clay from which we arise, just as the cu-
neiform characters were initially pressed into moist clay tablets in the first
forms of writing.

Each cuneiform is like a little upside-down pyramid with its tip pointing
downward. With their bottoms narrower than the tops, they form an archway—
a portal in the midfoot—giving us the skeletal archetype for the foot’s architec-
ture, especially the transverse arch.

The cuneiforms are preceded, almost like passengers on a ship, by the aptly
named navicular, from the Latin navis, or boat. The navicular, with its strongly
concave proximal surface, articulates with and distributes force through the
talus, through the cuneiforms, to the first through third metatarsals and pha-
langes. Together these comprise the medial longitudinal arch, vital for its role in
support, movement, flexibility, and springiness. Laterally, we have the lateral
longitudinal arch, created by the calcaneus, the cuboid, and the fourth and fifth
metatarsals. The longitudinal arches act as pillars for the transverse arch that
runs diagonally across the tarso-metatarsal joints.

The metatarsals are shaped like little femurs—mighty little twigs—and are
considered “long bones.”