SENSES: Senses 04.06.2013

For Jonathan

Come to your senses they said. Be practical. You aren't young anymore. In a dizzying array of misunderstanding, I look across the grand chasm and wonder how to traverse the other side. That is exactly the point. I have, finally, come to my senses. Each one fuel, each one wind fanning the latent embers. It is a joyous homecoming. I welcome them all and I am terrified.

I knew a man who sat for 14 years. Every day he would go to the same spot in nature, without distraction, and sit. Through rain, frost, snow, glorious temperate perfection, humidity and starving insects. Sometimes for 15 minutes, sometimes for an hour. Sometimes overnight. Every day. Same place.

.

Something happened to him. Like the purple crocus I saw this morning yearning towards the light, he experienced an unfolding. His brain developed new neural pathways. The stillness allowed Nature to seep in and recover his nature. He came to his senses. Without the noise, they revealed themselves, layer upon layer--a genetic chain of ancestral memory and survival. He remembered the intimate co-evolution with his surroundings. For haven’t our eyes developed because of our relationship to the sun, to light?

The Lakota have a name for this cultivation of quietude. Wowahwaka. As Gilbert Walking Bull, a Lakota Elder shared, you need to be in this state in order to hear the sound of Spirit. It is this deep inner quietness that develops our 6^th sense.

We once were at the mercy of large predators. And perhaps we have them to thank for fine-tuning the smell of danger or the ability to hear the subtle snap of twig signaling potential harm. The way our adept eyes can read the tracks and sign--the stories--of the landscape. Helping us to know whether we were the hunter or hunted. Our senses are the link between life or death.

The dulling of the senses is sure to be the end of us. Our large predators now buried in tar pits, locked beneath sand and rock, or stuck immobile in museums. Extinct. Can we remember and re-calibrate ourselves, unearth that cellular memory without having to sit for 14 years?

A friend of mine took leave of his senses. Gravity took him 220 feet down at 75mph, back to salty origins. I have spent many a grief-stricken night thinking about this: After he jumped, did he have a regret? Did he come to his senses seconds too late? Was the predator within so strong he felt this was his only means of escape? Is this what happens when the hunter and hunted battle within the same body? 

It is torture this unanswered thinking. I can’t let it draw me into its sweeping current. Instead I go outside into the woods and sit on last year’s leaves. They crackle beneath my weight. The wind is sharp and brisk, the return of the sun, brilliant. Pushing up through the decay, regal in their purple elegance, the crocuses.

There is a fragile burning inside each one of us. We are all firetenders. Do you feel it nestled inside the deepest chambers of the heart?  In the place where anatomy has no name? It is there beneath the numbing, the smoldering. Beneath the fear of fires blazing. I tell you this with concern and care...get a shovel...right now...Go...STOP READING THIS! And begin to dig! Uncover that place. It belongs to you. It is you...waiting with every heartbeat. We are so patient with our demise. Where is the urgency??? This IS an attack of our heart! Excavate those dying embers and tend to them. Feed them fuel. Give them breath. Then go outside and find a place in nature and sit. Wowahwaka. Let the wisdom of the senses guide you and ask: 

How will I love my life?

SENSES: Sight 04.05.13

From here the view is beautiful.  Every day the sun sets over the mountains.  Hues of every pigment painted like a perfect Bob Ross classic.  Everyday it rises in the east.  It’s stunning golden glory blazes in the windows and nearly blinds you.  It’s...it’s just so admirable and unmatched.

I used to stare over the land and see happy faces, ribbons flicked and whipped by the wind, forsythia like fireworks, glades of grass growing before our eyes at the speed of a newborn’s growth.  Yes, I used to lay in the pools and drift the summer away as I watched the sparrows dart and dive like synchronized swimmers.  I saw the complete perfection in this place. It was admirable and unmatched.

Once I ran through the woods here, barefoot, giddy like I had just been granted the opportunity to fly.  I couldn’t fly, obviously, but I felt like I could.  If you looked to the woods you’d see flashes of my billowing white skirt trailing behind me.  I was looking for a gift.  When I saw it, the mere vision of it screamed “TAKE ME!”  I gouged the roots out and carried a baby tree back with me.   It was a beautiful gift for this land.  It was admirable and unmatched.

Now I stand here high up, way, way high up.  I’ve spent my days here.  My nights.  I have cared for and poured love into this visage of perfection that I knew.  That I thought I knew.  I don’t know this place.  I trusted this place.  In the time I’ve spent here the vision of perfection has all come crashing down to sadness, misconception and loneliness. Pain aches and churns and emotions run rampant in my gut.  I have seen winds carry high knots up here on the mountain, flinging limbs and debris at unexpecting hosts.  I have seen feline friends chew the heads off too-slow finches only looking to fill their empty bellies.  I have seen snow storms devastate this land and forcefully put it to sleep.  I don’t know this place.  I thought it was admirable and unmatched, but now all I can see is this land for the trueness that it is.  Disappointing and ordinary. 

SENSES: Smell 04.04.2013

I don't know how others may experience this, but to me it feels like knots, a heaviness in my chest. It's not always extreme. It's often imperceptible, an unconscious nagging. It may be from anxiety. It may be from fatigue, worry, doubt. It may just be the result of a cloudy day. Whatever it is, it must escape or else settle darkly within.

I have various ways of discovering what this darkness is and where it lies. Writing has helped in this regard. It's a way of having a conversation with myself. And sometimes I reveal my own secrets. Like finding a map to a hidden pressure point: once pushed, ahhh, a sigh is released, something escapes to the light.

Particular smells cut out all the small talk that writing to one's self provides. These smells enter your mind through different means and undo your tensions with ease.

Two stories and several stragglers may help me to explain.

...

I once lived on High Street in the Brooks House. (Moved out just a few months before the fire actually.) I had electric heat, didn't have a lot of money, so I kept it around fifty. Wore slippers always, a sweater, and often a hat. The drafts were bad. I'd hold my hand by the window and feel the cold air pouring in. So I went to the hardware store and got some pliable foam for the cracks and gaps, and some plastic sheeting to cover the windows from top to bottom--the kind you tighten and seal with a hair dryer, laborious but effective.

It was horrible. Felt like I was living in a plastic bag for five months. The cold air didn't enter so boldly now, but the warm air, from those few unexpected days in winter, lingered just on the other side of plastic and glass.

Then came early March and the hope of spring winds. I didn't dare strip the plastic from my windows yet, but the longer days and the addition of an hour to the afternoon buoyed my spirits. As did the hyacinth plants that I started to bring home from the grocery store.

Their fragrance simmered in my small apartment all day, slowly creeping into every crevice, and building up an offensive at the doorway. Striding through the door, bewildered and fatigued from another school day spent with at-risk youth, I was always tossed sideways into delight and contentment. I'd be drawn by the nose to the short wooden shelf where my hyacinth sat innocently.

I'd approach with care and reverence, as though it were a sacred object. Breathing out first, clearing my lungs, I'd bring my nose close to its stalk of flowers and inhale deeply, filling my chest from the bottom up, holding in fragrance, the sweetness lingering in my nostrils, a lightness and ease coming over me. Then, I'd breath out and feel lighter still.

...

Pho Hong in Burlington's Old North End sells, as you might have guessed it, pho--immaculate pho, at that. The broth clear and rich, the noodles soft and fresh, the meat tender. It's served to you in a deep bowl with a variety of garnishes: lime wedge, cilantro, thai basil, mung bean sprouts.

The first time I had pho I thought these garnishes were a quite unusual side salad. I tore the basil and cilantro leaves over the sprouts, sprinkled it all with lime juice, and dug in. Refreshing but not too appealling on its own. I was embarrassed to discover later that they weren't, in fact, a side salad. I haven't made the same mistake again.

When the steaming broth now appears before me at the table, I stick my face down into it. My glasses fog up. I take those off. I breathe in the steam, filling my lungs. I sigh deeply. Now having entered a new world, I look to my other options.

First the bean sprouts, those go in. Then the cilantro and basil are torn and sprinkled down into the steam. They wilt immediately and the scents drift up; my face coming down again to meet them. With my glasses still on the table, slowly defogging, I sigh again, deeper this time. Something in my chest unwinds itself and pushes for my throat. When I squeeze the lime its spritz leaps into the air, and its juice drips down. Sometimes, if the sunlight is angled just right, I notice the spritz still hanging in the air, mingling with the rising steam, and time slows.

I lick my fingers, pick up my chopsticks, and my head lowers once more; I sigh once more. With this sigh, the knot now untied in my chest, whatever I was holding rises up and out, and I eat.

...

The heavy, clinging smell of a fire. Music, revelry, and reverie. A connection with times past.

...

The smell of a lover. The exchange of breath. Their scent on your fingertips.

...

Soil from the garden left beneath your nails.

...

Cherry tree blossoms warmed in the sun.

SENSES: Taste 04.03.2013

It was serious business.

The first one.

All the particular attributes required examination in detail.  Notes were taken.

The texture...alien.
The shape...pleasing, but inconvenient (cannot fit in mouth all at once).
The roastability...somewhat lacking.
The tackiness...adequate, perhaps better than previously imagined based on accounts of experienced young friends. Not sure it can be used as glue, but maybe temporarily.
The coverage...thorough.
The flavor...undoing.

The homemade version didn't fare as well to a flame as we all hoped, but any disappointment on this point faded only just shy of immediately when the first gooey bite entered your mouth. It was like watching a scientist at work. Your expression became grave as you carefully lingered through bite after bite. You had watched me measure the syrup, pour the batter into the pan, poke them every hour to see if they were ready to cut. You watched and waited while the fire was built, watched and waited with a sharpened stick at the ready. But nothing prepared you for this, the joy of silently devouring your first roasted marshmallow, the sticky sweetness that would spread all over your face and fingers, the way the maple could sing in its new, spongy context. Gravity was lifted into a fit of giggles, the scowl of deep concentration replaced by a wide, gooey grin.

All I wanted to do in that moment was taste it with your tongue.

Four years later, you've requested maple marshmallows instead of birthday cake for your bonfire party, and I will think of that moment I wanted to taste your first marshmallow bite with you, to discover it as a shiny new pleasure. There have been other homemade and store bought versions in your life in between that moment and this weekend, but none have been examined with such intensity, nor experienced with such explosive delight. I wonder, with all your big-kid friends around you, around the fire...will that moment flash into your consciousness? Will your tastebuds tingle, just a wee bit, at the memory? Will you be aware that you are remembering the love I poured into that pan, that sweetened every bite more so than the maple?

Perhaps you do know what I mean, when I tell you the story about the molasses-milk, and how tasting it always takes me back in my memory to the foggy moments after your birth.

So, we'll go on a journey, then, with maple on our tongues, away from the bitter cold of this early Spring, to memories of grass under our feet and golden sunlight sinking on a warm afternoon, molten marshmallow lava running down our chins. Happy birthday, baby.

SENSES: Touch 04.02.2013

Watching my belly undulate under my shirt I couldn’t wait to hold this tiny person for the first time. Only a few more weeks, I would tell myself.

My arms ached to hold her.

I was expecting our first child and had been put on bedrest due to uncontrollable contractions. I wasn’t in labor, the doctor would assure me, but they didn’t want to take any chances. Either did we. My husband and I had tried and tried for this little person. I had fallen so deeply in love with her at the first sight of that positive test, taken the morning of my 30th birthday.

Now, here I was in bed during a beautiful Vermont summer watching my belly move and wiggle with the life that it contained. I couldn’t help but worry. Would the currently painless and harmless contractions get worse? Would they throw me into irreversible pre-term labor? Would she be ok?

My arms ached to hold her.

The first of a string of worries that comes with parenthood. A near constant worry for the safety/well being/happiness of someone you love more than you’d ever imagine. It also felt like the start of my relationship with my daughter.

Before being assigned to my bed I lead a normal, active and sometimes busy life. Preparing for our daughter’s arrival and working full time kept me busy. There would be days that I would only have a few moments to really give my pregnancy, and the baby within my, full attention.

But now, now I was focusing on her 100% of the time. Undivided attention was given to her flutters and kicks. I learned that she loved for me to gently push back when she pushed out with her feet. I also came to know that she loved having her back rubbed. Something that nearly 3 years later still holds true. If she became restless all it would take is a rub of my belly and her daddy’s voice. With every one of her movements I could feel my worries melt away little by little. I was getting to know my daughter weeks before meeting her.

The aching in my arms grew stronger.

After nearly 6 weeks of bed rest I was allowed to resume normal activity. It was safe to go into labor. I was ready when she was. Two weeks later she arrived. Labor was hard and I was scared. My worry peaked with every centimeter that I didn’t dilate. Every contraction brought me closer to finally holding her and with it more worries. 10.5 hours later our daughter entered the world.

She was perfect. Beyond perfect. We were in love. We were a family.

I wrapped my arms around my daughter for the first time, feeling the warmth and weight of her just born body. “There you are.” I said to her. Her cries quieted. My heart swelled. I was finally touching my baby.

My arms no longer ached.

I started to cry as I looked at this perfect little being. The product of my husband and I. Through squinty newborn eyes she looked up at me and reached up with her minutes old hand and touched my face.

32 months later and she will still reach up and put her hand on my face. If I am upset, she will tell me everything is ok and rub my face. If she is tired she lays in my arms and reaches up for a light touch. It is her way of connecting with me and, for a moment, it is just her and I. All my worries melt away.

I focus, once again, on my daughters touch.

SENSES: Intuition 04.01.2013

It was you that made me say yes to a week long road trip thru the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina with a man I barely knew at 18 years old. He said he wanted to go swimming in the ocean or a river and it wasn’t warm enough yet in Vermont. My mind said no. You made me say yes because I wanted to take risks and I didn’t want to associate risk with consequence. I said yes because my insides were articulating something new and feverish when I was around him and that felt like enough.

You led me to grab his hand in the woods and learn what it felt like to be still with someone; curious and pulsating without the need to control and qualify. Two months later, while talking on the phone in the dark in our parent’s homes, and dreaming up our futures, he was telling me about his upcoming solo trip to Europe. The one he was leaving for in 3 weeks. My heart pumped like a wild animal under my bones until the words flung out like a slingshot from heart to mouth and I asked to go with him. 

We fell in love in Portugal, Spain, Italy. We fell in love back in Vermont, Massachusetts, Montreal, Michigan, Emeryville, San Francisco. 14 years later, and we are going on a road trip around the California desert because it's not hot enough in San Francisco and we crave the heat. We are going on a road trip because while trying to figure out what we want to be when we grow up and where we want to build a home, you got inside of both of us again.  

It was you that led me into that restaurant that often wasn’t open but was open that night. It was raining and the art exhibit on brightly painted walls was entitled, “God’s Greatest Gifts: Fruit and Sex.” I sat in a booth by the window under a painting of a large mango surrounded by various cut out illustrations from the Kama Sutra. You led me into that restaurant where Neil Young was singing about the Harvest Moon or how the world was turning, both of which my Dad used to sing with his band called Magik. Dad had recently died and I had been listening to his recordings on cassette tape and trying to make sense out of the passing of a parent.

You led me into that little container of color and smell and sound and nostalgia. Even though there was no one else dining in the restaurant, I wasn’t turned off; I claimed it all for myself and I dined for everyone.

You led me there. Even though I had just finished college, and then a year as a literacy tutor for AmeriCorps. Despite the fact that I thought I should do something “important” next, I sat there eating course after course of food and drink and I felt my mind fall out and my gut turn on. I felt a new kind of fever and I asked the server if I could be a part of what they were doing there. I didn’t intend on being a waitress, but I had every intention of being a part of something awesome, intimate, and memorable. I wanted to orchestrate that awakening and unraveling in others. I worked there for a couple of years. I wrote my essay to get into graduate school about that restaurant. My master’s thesis was about food, ritual, and performance. I’m still in restaurants. I’m still in love. And 12 years later, that mango painting hangs above our bed.

SENSES: Sound 03.31.2013

The last conversation I ever had with my grandmother was about cherries. “I don’t know if I’d like those”, she responded in a weakly engaged voice. It wasn’t that she had never eaten cherries; it was that she couldn’t remember much at all by that point. The Alzheimer’s and cancer had run rampant, leaving her disoriented in both mind and body.

It was a warm summer evening, and as we sat on her porch, she slid her slippers across the carpet with great, friction-y swooshes. One foot, then the other. One foot, then the other. It was almost hypnotizing.

The world outside was chatty, as it is on warm summer nights in rural Southern Vermont. Crickets, woodpeckers, a distant lawn mower. Most of all, I loved listening to the chickadees sing.

chickadee-dee-dee
chickadee-dee-dee

When she closed her eyes and fell asleep, slumped in her chair, her breath became deep and rumbling. I swished the dregs of my iced tea around its glass and smiled at her truly house-shaking and robust snores. This woman, who in sickness and health, always roared with laughter that was far too large for her tiny body.

 I watched her until the sun went down, until the woodpeckers stopped pecking, until the lawn mower stopped mowing.

Then, until the chickadees stop singing.