senses

It’s forty-five degrees and rainy today. Two days ago it was eighty-four and sunny. I think snow is in the forecast this week; that, or triple digits. I can’t keep track. Nor do I care that much. It’s weather; I like weather. Whether it is collar up, teary-eyed, runny-nose, bone-vibrating cold; or sweat on the tip of my nose, prickly heat, brow-dripping, sun-burning hot. Either. I’m good. Middle ground works best for being most benign, of course; those New England type, low-humidity seventies with the air-clarity of New York’s Southern Tier, the colors of the Sonoran Desert, and the salty-scented wind of the coast. Everyone loves autumn or spring weather. “Pleasant” they say. Mostly because it doesn’t hit you in the face.

I don’t mind a little headbanging with the elements.

Anyway, it’s raining now. So I’m inside, physically, mentally, psychologically. Like a grocery-store lobster, like a termite, like Kenneth Graham’s Mole, like the malted part of a malted milk ball. That’s me—I’m inside today. I will go for a walk to the river, stroll up Pintail Road past the pond to the dock; I’ll abandon the warm here at Aerie, finish first my cup of hot chai latte, all steamy and frothy.

I have a game I play when things seem down, dark, or otherwise non-descript and boring. It’s actually quite effective: I imagine I’m already dead.

I imagine I found out that time is short—a feat not difficult to imagine these days as several people I care for very deeply no longer have to imagine this; it is real. But I force myself to imagine hearing the news, the disbelief followed by denial and then anger. Then somewhere before acceptance I imagine the rain.

I remember the streak of wet up my back when I was a kid on the island riding my bike after a summer shower. Or the choppy Great South Bay splashing at my knees when Eddie and I would walk along the rocks of Heckscher. I remember Spain, the Camino back from Finisterre to Santiago, and that day it poured the entire time, and a fog settled ahead of us, and we were soaked, but we were so alive, finding small medieval chapels where we stood under the overhang and listened to the far-reaching quiet of Galicia. We found an albergue and changed clothes and walked to a pub and played foosball and had some local brew.

The rain was a visceral reminder we were alive, right then, a drop-by-drop pronouncement of existence. Rain doesn’t reach the interior walls of anyone’s sarcophagus. It is solely for us, for those here, those of us still alive and aware.

And then I imagine the sun.

I remember the heat while hiking Sabino near Tucson, deep pools of mountain water to dive into after my body was dripping with sweat from heat. Or the cold, the uniquely-desert-borne cold feel of my skin when I turned under a cliff into shade and the dry air dropped twenty degrees. Once, in Senegal, in the southwestern Sahara, I fell asleep on a cot in the yard of a house in a small village, and the heat woke me up. I went to the porch and the thermometer in the shade read one hundred and ten. I can remember my shoulders, the tingling sensation when I lightly rubbed my palm across my skin. It caused shivers to run down my spine.

Alive. Absolute clarity.

So, really, so I’ve stoped bitching about the rain, or the cold, or the heat.

Or about anything really. I am alive.

I’m at my desk and above me rain is pelting the skylight tonight. Out the window the deep woods are misty, and I can’t hear any of the normal wrens or even crows. Just the sound of rain and the distant rumble of tires out on 33 more than a mile away. If this clears out before bed, I’ll go out and look at the planets and the stars with the telescope and deep-space binoculars and it will be cold, upper thirties cold, and at first I’ll move from foot to foot, bouncing to keep warm, until some sort of numbness settles in, and I’ll breathe hard on purpose to watch my breath, and my neck will feel wet and cold, and I’ll remember this part of the night as much as I’ll remember spotting Vega or Alpha Centauri. What contrasts! The billions of years ago presence of stars and the immediate dripping reminder of the right now.

How often are we aware of our existence? I mean, how often are we conscious of the beauty and sensation of our life? We go through motions, we dress so we can’t feel the warmth or the cold but who doesn’t love the cold feel of our bare feet on the grass at twilight? We eat so we feel the nothingness of not being hungry, but to fast once in a while is to cleanse our minds of the monotony of food. We don’t connect to others because we find something familiar in the airgap lives we lead in a world where whatever is most convenient works best and connections back to those we knew is so much easier than reaching out to those who just might be in our lives moving forward.

But back to the rain,

my God the rain slaps us, and this is what makes our lives on this earth unique. In the distant unfathomable reaches of eternity both behind us and yet to come is a nothingness and never ever againness that stretches without end, in a state of seemingly complete unexisting. But here, now, we shiver, we sweat, we stretch ourselves to shake off the stiffness, and we wipe our eyes, throw some cold water on our faces, shake off the drowsiness, and live.

Because now is all there is left. As one dear friend of mine recently commented about “passing”: “Then I’ll close the door behind me.” This is it. Make no mistake, this is it,

and still people avoid the cold, avoid the rain, the sleet and snow, the blazing sun, but those extremes make us aware of the present. Humanity’s most vulnerable trait in shunning the passing of time is its apparent need to remain numb as much as possible. Meanwhile, if we tolerate the rain we can see droplets of life on the beautiful flowers outside, shake the wet from our hair, catch some drops of life on our tongue.

Am I being a bit mystical? A little too “earthy”? Damn right. But just how much time being alive have we lost by blaming weather? The atmosphere can be most inconvenient, it seems. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Move on.

“I hate the rain,” some say. “I hate the heat” some say. Sure there are legitimate reasons to abstain from constant weather-beating. Asthma, sensitive skin, and other issues.

But no one should ever miss the experience of the sound of rain on a lake. The blinking away of snow from your eyes. The vertical streak of sweat down your back on a hot day. No one should veer around the puddles. Let that water rip up your back and even the back of your head. Honestly, you can change clothes and dry off, put on warm clothes when you get back inside.

We are dying, my friends. Some soon, some not so soon. So let’s go for a walk in the rain. You and me. Let’s stand on the lawn when it snows. We can sit on a bench in a park when the sun is so strong we will feel it in our veins. Because at some point, whether we are ready or not, we will wish for one more rainfall. We will pray for another soft blanket of snow. We will trade the best of our days for one more season, whatever season it may be.

The weather is the closest we come to recognizing the immediate. And the rain says, quite softly most of the time, “Come. Fill up your senses.”

Truly. There will come a time when we understand that all of it–the lashing of rain and the drifts of endless snow–will be behind us, whether we wish it to be or not.

Jesus Christ, Fanny Brice
Wolfie Mozart and Humphrey Bogart
And Genghis Khan
And on to H. G. Wells

Ho Chi Minh, Gunga Din
Henry Luce and John Wilkes Booth
And Alexanders King and Graham Bell

Ramar Krishna, Mama Whistler
Patrice Lumumba and Russ Colombo
Karl and Chico Marx
Albert Camus

E.A. Poe, Henri Rousseau
Sholom Aleichem and Caryl Chessman
Alan Freed and Buster Keaton too

And each one there
Has one thing to share:

They have sweat beneath the same sun
Looked up in wonder at the same moon
And wept when it was all done
For bein’ done too soon
For bein’ done too soon

–Neil Diamond “Done too Soon”

In my creative writing classes I gave an assignment to exemplify the benefits of immediate experience over memory of a previous encounter, and of allowing all our senses to participate instead of just one.

I sent half the students into their respective bathrooms (without limitations upon identification, of course) with a pad and pen and I asked them to spend ten minutes in there and describe it. The other half of the students stayed in the classroom but did the same thing. The results of this second group were always predictable. Certainly, every one of them had been in the bathrooms multiple times through the semester, but still they almost universally remember the trite—running water, unpleasant odor, writing on the wall, mysterious missing locks on the stalls, paper towels on the floor around the garbage can.

When the first group returned, their notes were a bit more illuminating. Not just unpleasant smells but one of overwhelming cleansers; the low buzz of a fluorescent bulb, the mirrors always slightly too low on the wall, the faucet left on, the urinal still running, the clogged commode.

We experience with five senses, sometimes six if you include that sense of familiarity, of déjà vu, but we tend to remember and often only experience with one—sight. Studies show we rely upon how things “look” to recall them more than eighty percent of the time, yet the number one trigger for recall is smell. “Use ALL the senses,” I tell them. “Perhaps ‘taste’ is not so appropriate in this particular assignment, but sound is essential, obviously smell, and touch for its absence—how can you not include the desire to not touch anything?”

We spend a good deal of our lives living in the singular. One thing at a time; one sense is enough, one path in the woods. One thing problematic in this dip back to Psych 101 is how much we are missing. Sure, sometimes one is enough—but even when we eat, taste is only a fraction of the experience—the aroma draws us in and works with taste for complement, and presentation strikes first, of course. And how many of us are not crazy about a particular food because of its texture (for me, swordfish).

Shift:

This morning I sat on the rocks at the river, trying to mentally juggle too many happenings at once. The new semester starts soon—online for now—and I thought about how I had hoped for more classes but enrollment is way down, so then I thought about the project I’m working on to catalogue as many readings about nature from writers as I can and my attempts to summon interest, then about a new book project I started, kinda—okay, not so much started as stepped in that direction—and about my sharp, intensely sharp spike in anxiety and depression when the news is violent, when the rhetoric is redundant and aggravating and angry, and about a tree which fell and needs to be cut up, and about

and about…

and…

the coffee kicked in and I took a deep breath, exhaled very slowly into the chilly breeze, and reminded myself that I need to warm up to the day in much the same way we would warm up before a class at the health club. Take deep breathes through the nose, out slowly through the mouth, stretch, let all our senses work—and stretch those senses, make them limber, feel and see and touch and taste and hear all at once, not only like we are absorbing the world around us but the world around us is absorbing us.

This doesn’t work well in the city. It doesn’t even work well at home on a mat in a quiet room—we created the room by design and experience. No, nature is safe from subjective influence, it remains absent of judgement and human influence; there’s nothing out there we need to “get to” while looking around. It has a sense of eternal about it.

So I sat on the rocks and did that breathing thing, and the cold tightened the skin on my face the way cold wind does, and I could sense every touch of air across my reddened and tight neck and cheeks. On my tongue and lips that taste of salt I have known since my childhood, the marshy odor, the freshness of the Chesapeake, and the waves ripping against the rocks, lapping on the sand, breaking ten feet out in the river, the call of a gull behind me, the low distant rumble of a workboat diesel.

And then, dominantly, the view, the view which reaches deep into the immediate and blocks out all things social and political and makes us present. The deeply blue water today, the intrusively blue sky, the foam from the cold water on the sand and the white edges on the tips of the breaking waves. The small green strip of interruption that is Parrott Island a mile or so out, and the glint of sun off the window of a truck crossing the Norris Bridge in the west.

I am rarely present these days, distracted by what I hear on the radio, disturbed by the distance between where I am and where I need to be. It happens to us all. The changes in my life over the past two and a half years have been so drastic that sometimes—usually—it is hard to keep up with everything, so I turn to the constant, the familiar, to let my senses recalibrate themselves and make things right.

I like—need—order in my very unorderly life. And stepping into nature is perhaps the most reliable method of getting all my ducks in a row and feeling centered again. There’s something Thoreauvian about that, of course, and Jung is part of this equation, but for me on a much simpler and basic train of thought, it’s the undefinable persistence of beauty that brings me peace. And the innate need of us all to love. Lao Tzu was right when he insisted that “Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the senses.”

So many changes, so much turmoil, so many medications and sessions and updates and downplays that have distracted us all from what should be elemental in our lives—ourselves, and all of our senses working together. It is the cure for the soul, as Oscar Wilde once noted, as is the soul the cure for the senses.

In this new year I’ve noticed something which at once was subtle but has become too persistent to ignore—I’m stepping further away from that which doesn’t bring peace to my mind. And the one absolute I know is I never had that problem in nature.

It just makes sense.