Sense of Smell

Apple Blossoms

I’m a pretty healthy person and usually manage to avoid catching the latest virus going around. But this spring I wasn’t so lucky. The virus that hit me was unlike anything I’ve experienced in a long, long time! At first I thought it was a new, horrible allergy because the only symptom was a complete inability to breathe through my nose. It was like I had no nostrils at all. I felt like I was suffocating, my ears filled up, and panic ensued. A couple of days later, the cough started and that’s when I realized I had a cold! But the worst part for me was that even when I could take a breath through my nose, I couldn’t smell anything. And this lasted for a week. Long after the congestion subsided enough to be tolerable. And I am not ashamed to say I freaked. I felt that my life was over. Yes, that sounds dramatic. I can, in fact, be quite dramatic when the occasion merits it (in my opinion anyway - and I can hear my son saying, "Mom, you're being so dramatic!").

I spoke with many people about this over the course of the week of no sense of smell. I was assured that it would come back when the congestion cleared (but I even when I could breathe, I couldn’t smell). My pharmacist daughter-in-law explained to me how inflammation influences how our smell receptors respond to aroma chemicals, and my other daughter-in-law shared that she recently had the same thing happen to her. Several people in town said that either they or someone they knew experienced the same thing with this particular virus - and their sense of smell came back. But I had read online (a terrible thing to do!) of many cases where people permanently lost their sense of smell after a cold. What if this happened to me??? It won’t, I was told. Over and over and over. And I knew they were right, but that little niggling of doubt would creep in.

Mint

I need my ability to smell because I make perfume! I make herbal skin care and need to smell the essential oils I add. I garden and the fragrance of the soil and herbs nourish my soul. We need to smell in order to taste the nuances of flavors in food. I have a huge collection of amazing flavored olive oils and balsamic vinegars - what’s the point if I can’t taste them? Or being able to smell what I’m cooking as I add herbs and spices - or even to know when something I’m baking is close to being done? Or, what if there’s a gas leak or a fire or something is wrong with my car? We depend on being able to smell to warn us of danger. These are the “practical” things that we depend on our nose for. Things you might not even think about during the course of the day, but that are very important indeed!

But for me it became more than that. Each breath I took felt like dead air. There was nothing alive about it. I breathed and I lived but that was it. It’s hard to explain. The air was nothing - just a gas that I took into my body and breathed out again. There was no pleasantness about it, or unpleasantness. I couldn’t smell when the kitty litter needed to be scooped. I couldn’t even smell the gas when I filled my car one day! And I began to feel isolated, like I was in a bubble and was completely separated from everything. Not so much people, but everything else.

I knew, of course, how important my sense of smell is to making perfume and my herbal products and the fragrances bring me such pleasure! But it was more than that. Smell, I realized, is one of the major ways I feel connected to life itself. It was spring and one of the absolute best smells is of snow melting. Have you ever smelled snow melt? What about the way the earth smells in spring after a rain? Or the salt tang of being near the ocean? Or the fragrance of walking in a forest of fir and pine trees? Or fresh cut wood? An antique shop or your grandmother’s attic? Have you ever smelled a slug? (If not, pick one up this year and give it a whiff or give your skin a whiff where it was. They do indeed have a very definite smell!). If I was a chemist I might be able to tell you which chemicals make that slug smell or cause roses to smell like roses and not lilacs.

White Peony

What I can say is that smell connects me to everything alive in the world. It’s how I get important information, yes, and it also feeds my soul and makes me who I am. This was a revelation. I’ve imagined what it might be like if I were to suddenly go blind. And I know someone who is living that reality right now. (Though hopefully things will improve for her.) I admire her courage and that she has a sense of humor about it. For that week of not being able to smell I thought of her often and what she was going through. It really opened my awareness to how her world is changing and the task she has before her recreating so much of her life.

The morning my sense of smell came back, I was eating my breakfast of yogurt and granola with maple syrup on it. And I realized I could taste the maple, as opposed to just the sweet of the syrup. I leaped out of the chair and began smelling everything! Various jars of herbs, perfumes, the cats, coffee! What a miracle smell is! I felt reborn, alive and so very, very grateful to have this most important sense returned. For a few days after, I kept on checking to make sure I could still smell - I did still have the cold. Now I’m not as obsessive about it, but I do not take it for granted, and I know I never will. A few days of breathing a lifeless, inert gas was enough to remind me not only the practical things I rely on my sense of smell for, but how important it is in my perception of and connection to the living and miraculous world around me.

Lemon Verbena

Pictures of fragrant flowers and herbs taken by me.

Broken - Five Years Later

It has been five years since the BP oil disaster. Not much has changed since then. We know the Gulf has not recovered. Will likely never recover. Not only from the BP oil, but from all the other insults, large and small, to that ecosystem that happened before BP and since BP. And oil continues to spill - into the Gulf, into our rivers and streams, into wetlands and back yards. It explodes on trains, and obtaining more of it regardless of the cost to Earth and the future is a never-ending quest. What have humans learned?

All my life, looking back as far as I can remember, the woods, fields, rivers, and streams of my home place have been my playground, my solace, and my teacher. Among my fondest memories are my father showing me animal signs (scat, markings on trees, etc.) as we’d walk in the woods, camping with my family in a big old army tent in totally “unimproved” camping areas. I became an avid skier (though my father compared the slopes to clear cuts - and he was right of course), and enjoyed snow shoeing and cross country skiing too. The latter with a wineskin of rich red wine, a hunk of crusty bread, and sharp cheese for a winter picnic. For the past 25 years, my love has been gardening, and my teachers the trees, herbs, and other rooted beings who live and thrive in and around my garden and nearby fields and woods.

In my “past life” as an activist (before I moved to Maine), my aim was to share my personal stories about my relationship with the Earth, and how they informed who I was and what I did in the world. I wanted more than anything to awaken in people a love of the Earth that was real and tangible and strong enough to impact how they lived on a day to day basis. I wanted people to feel, deep in their bones and soul, that we are part of not separate from this living Earth without which we would cease to exist. That the beauty we see each day makes us who we are. That the colors and fragrances and tastes of our home places literally create us. And that when we harm these places, we harm ourselves and become less than - and thus condemn our children and grandchildren to being less than as well. Through no fault of their own.
    

All those years I managed to keep my heart and spirit strong in the love and spirit of the Earth, of Gaia. Yes, there were some very painful experiences of feeling the horror of degradation and permanent loss. Such as my seeing my first huge clear cut in the Pacific Northwest. I had heard of them but nothing compares to actually being there. I could not believe my eyes, but my body immediately reacted as if I’d been kicked, hard, in the stomach. Seeing huge mountains literally shaved of every single tree up one side and down the other was surreal. How could human beings do such a thing??? I remember on another trip out west, I was driving in a rental car on my way to a camping area in the Olympic National Park. It was just before a moratorium on clear cutting Old Growth was to take effect so paper companies were rushing to get as much out as possible. Log truck after log truck came out of the National Forest loaded with HUGE trunks. Several carrying just a couple, they were so big. And then a truck drove by with just one. It was like these loggers were killing our ancestors, and this one tree, this one Being, broke my heart. I had to pull over because I couldn’t see for the tears streaming down my cheeks. How could they DO THIS?? I still do not know the answer to that question.

But . . . the pain I felt fueled my love and my commitment to do what I could to stop the destruction of the Ancient Forests, and my organization joined with others to form a national coalition to save what little was left of the Ancient Forests, both temperate and tropical.

Another seminal moment was interviewing Julia Hill Butterfly when she was doing her treesit in the ancient redwood she named Luna, to prevent it from being cut. Even though I was in Maine talking to Julia on the phone, I could feel Luna’s strong presence come through as clearly as Julia’s voice. It was like she and Luna were one, and I was getting to interview both of them. 

 The reality, for me, is that these Ancient Beings are wise and essential. Not only for the well-being of the planet but for our well-being, and even survival, as a species. When the Old Growth is gone, and there is very little left now, we will have lost the oldest living beings on this planet. And with them their wisdom, their strength, their spiritual essence that is part of the planet as a whole. Indeed every time a species becomes extinct, we lose a little more of what it is to be human. Think about that. Every day we become less and less human, and more and more . . . what? What are we becoming?

Which brings me to the BP oil disaster and the reason for this piece. What have we become? That disaster broke something in me. I felt it break and it has not healed. In an article in my journal (now defunct) Gaian Voices (Vol. 8, No. 3 & 4) I wrote, “Every day after April 20th I woke up with a feeling of dread, wondered why, then remembered. The oil. I cried and railed and commiserated with anyone who’d tolerate it. Driving to work or the store reminded me of my complicity. And it also gave me time to think, so I’d often be driving while tears ran down my cheeks. I live in such a beautiful place! The beauty was a reminder of the devastation. The birds I so love who frequent my yard and garden reminded me of the birds dead and dying, coated with oil, unable to fly. Everything is connected, the pain, the beauty, the love, the fear, the anger.”

Five years have passed and we have not learned. We have “moved on”. We have come to accept that these kinds of disasters are the cost of doing business, a cost the oil companies, the chemical companies, politicians, even “ordinary” people, have decided they are willing to pay. Don’t ask me why. I have no idea. Perhaps we’ve become hardened to the daily barrage of bad news. Perhaps we’ve been brainwashed by media to believe that our real problems are political terrorists bent on blowing us up (rather than political/corporate terrorists bent on destroying every living thing for profit). Perhaps we’ve decided it just isn’t true. None of it. Climate change isn’t real. Radiation isn’t killing and maiming in the Pacific. There are no islands of plastic in the ocean. Fracking is clean and safe. Maybe denial is the only way the majority of us can wake up and go about our day. 

I believed, I still believe, that Love (with a capital L) is the most powerful force in the universe. That Love can heal, can work miracles. That miracles are real (though born of hard work). I believe that working with the Earth we can transform our current dire reality into a life-affirming, sustaining, reality. There IS more to life than meets the eye (and all of our other senses). We (humans and nonhumans) are more than the sum of our parts. It is possible. But since the BP disaster, and how things have NOT changed since then, I am not holding my breath.

For me as a gardener, every spring is a new beginning. After plants have started to grow, and the new seedlings have taken on some heft but before anything has been eaten by some critter or insect, or smashed by heavy rain, or blighted by some disease, everything is beautiful and anything is possible. I know, logically, that chances are something won’t do well, maybe lots of somethings. I also know that somethings will do extremely well despite conditions. There will be losses and there will be harvests. And next year I will try again taking what I’ve learned and moving on. But it’s just my tiny garden. What if we were to consider the whole Earth our garden? Remember the Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young lyrics: “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden”? Can we do that? Can enough of us make a choice to “get back to the garden”? Maybe I’m just an aging hippie, an anachronism, on her way out. Maybe. But I want my grand children to look back on their childhoods and have memories of the woods and playing in streams, and camping in unimproved camping areas. I want them to know and love trees, maybe even have a unique tree friend (as I did) that they take their sadness and fears to, that they climb and swing from without fear. We do not need more oil or dollar stores or malls full of cheap crap that only ends up in landfills. We need the garden! We need clean air, blue skies, green fields, healthy food grown without chemicals or tampered DNA. 

Terry Tempest Williams visited the Gulf during the disaster and wrote about it for Orion. She wrote: “The blowout from the Macondo well has created a terminal condition: denial. We don’t want to own, much less accept, the cost of our actions. We don’t want to see, much less feel, the results of our inactions. And so, as Americans, we continue to live as though these 5 million barrels of oil spilled in the Gulf have nothing to do with us. The only skill I know how to employ in the magnitude of this political, ecological, and spiritual crisis is to share the stories that were shared with me by the people who live here. I simply wish to bear witness to the places we traveled and the people we met, and give voice to the beauty and devastation of both. To bear witness is not a passive act.”

To bear witness is not a passive act! Remember that! And when you bear witness, do not keep it to yourself. Speak out! Share it. And share your pain, tell us how it hurts and why. Do not be silent. It’s the least we can do. Even those of us who are broken.

All photos are mine except for the last one, which was taken by Lynn Slocum.