I’m out with my nose in the air, actively sniffing what is around. It feels like a comical thing to me, but I’m determined to awaken my senses and be with the wonder of creation through them more fully. Like some kind of animal other than human, I’m sniffing around in the air. I have to say, except when there is a powerful smell that might mean food or danger, my nose usually just takes it as comes and doesn’t exert itself much in doing its job. Walking the perimeter I find that the air here is sweet almost everywhere I go. There is a seemingly infinite variety of sweetness. God is blanketing the earth with sweet smelling flowers, even the trees rotting on the warm forest floor smell sweet. Following my nose I find a greenhouse, an organic garden and an arbor with honeysuckle and grape vines with a bench to sit and take in the aroma. On my contemplative walk, I stop to admire the scent of every plant and tree. Later in the day, I go to the beach to let my nose smell the ocean. I begin to wonder if it is only my nose that smells. It feels like more than to me, my throat, sinuses, lungs and stomach are involved in smelling too. Maybe even my heart smells in the midst of all that. At the beach, the first thing I smell is the decaying flesh of a poor sea lion laid out dead in the sand. Many people are sitting all around it as if it doesn’t exist. A couple nearly stumbles upon it and look at it curiously expecting it to be alive. I steer clear of it and head upwind. The ocean has a less clean smell than I hoped. I remember the Atlantic sea air and the salt marshes. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has research on “Seeing, Hearing and Smelling the World.” I’m drawn to the research on how the sense of smell is powerfully linked to memory: http://www.hhmi.org/senses/d110.html. I notice this ocean does not have the nice salty smell at all compared to the ones I remember from my childhood. This is a disappointment to me every time I come to the Pacific. I still have my nose in the air when it dawns on me that my nose is more judgmental than my other senses. Of course this ocean is just as great and the air is just as fresh, but I rank it lower because of the way it compares to a smell in my memory. I notice that I am far more willing to suspend judgment about whether or not a thing tastes, looks, feels or sounds good than I am about whether something smells good or bad. My nose makes snap judgments that I react to automatically and rate with interior pleasure or disgust. I am dismissive about smells. I notice this today and muse on the connection between making automatic smell judgments and what we mean when we say someone has her nose in the air.
