It's a tricky thing, talking about the way something smells. Unlike our other senses, we have very little common vocabulary for scent, and what we like and don't like is tremendously subjective -- sometimes incomprehensibly so. And all this is biochemically/neurologically strung just so, with all the imagery of Irish lace or dewy spiderwebs you could want. We smell differently. Not just the fragrance of each of us, also the way each of us perceives fragrance. And the way each of us are able to perceive the fragrances of the world. (The winning 2004 Nobel Physiology Prize work explains this beautifully.) And then, there are thousands of chemical compounds in the world, and limitless combinations thereof.
But that's not why it's tricky to talk about. All that is actually totally beside the point; the biology gets us there, but to hang the experience on the wonderful, exquisite and astounding hardware that makes it possible is like talking rods and cones while watching the the Perseid meteor shower under the purple skies of Utah's red desert. (Which I haven't done yet, though it creeps higher on my list of backpack plans every year.) The experience includes and transcends the biological hardware, and the chemical software.
The experience of scent transcends sense of self and preconception, more than any other sense, scent brings us to the immediate moment. And as quick, scent floods our minds with memories and associations, and tickles our body into physiological rapport. Talk about synesthesia! Each inhalation of scent is a microcosm complete, a dream and a true transport and a visceral root. The inhalation breathes into us an expanse that touches our cores and our voids, and the exhalation looses it all to the breeze. I think scent is difficult to discuss because at its depths, scent is a truly an internal -- an individual -- experience, and one that calls up all our own personal myths.
After smelling the concentrated essential oils of strong herbs, deep flowers and sacred woods-- and the fragrant growing world of a Northern California mountainside -- for four days, I think something in my metaneurology has grown. I notice scents more, but I'm also sure I sense scents more. The world smells so beautiful.
