Our Five Senses

During this season of gratitude, I am re-posting the Gratitude Series of essays. This one features the gifts of our senses.

Rain.

I look out my bay window and see rain. Precious rain sprinkling down upon the golds and reds and green splashes scattered across my lawn. My windows are open so I can smell the pattering upon each leaf and hear the freshness of the autumn lawn. My senses are intermingled as the setting transports me to other places and times, when body, heart, mind, and experience all intertwine into a mystical place inside myself, never recaptured but never forgotten.

Rain.

The bringer of life. Breaking down detritus, and nourishing reconstituted, healthy growth. (Now I see a squirrel climbing to the top of a nearly leafless tree.) (Now there’s another one, loping along my fence top.) Washing away the grit of the latest storm.

Rain .

… Let the rain fall. Drink from the waters. Share with others. Embrace the day and those who walk alongside you every day. Be a giver of life, not a taker.

~Michael Kroth, Rain, 2008 E-Newsletter

The instant I feel sorry for myself or I find myself ruminating about how unfair life is or castigating myself for doing something stupid, all I have to do is walk outside and take a moment to let the sun drench me in its warming light and watch the playful squirrels running along the top of my backyard fence. If I sit for just a few minutes on my back porch I can hear our neighbors’ pups (yes, all three of our neighbors have them, as do we) guarding their territories, and feel a breeze filtered through budding trees and all the emerging-spring-fragrance of late March. Just moments later I’ve stopping chewing my cud, stopped chewing and re-chewing and going over and over this or that. Nature has disrupted that worrisome, unending cycle through simple sensory pleasure.

There seem to be many portals to the profound. Our senses are five of them. Each – taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing – is a gift we have received without earning it, they are ours to have and to use simply by being born. Different people are blessed with their senses differently. Some can smell well but, like me, are colorblind or cannot see at all. Others have acute hearing but, like me, can’t tell the difference between a $100 bottle of wine - with all its smoky, charcoal, earthy, oaky, fruity, burnt, delicate, flavours, and its deeply complex bouquet wafting all around, and a $9.00 bottle of your best red whatever.

In the spirit of profundity, I of course always request a deep pour.

Rain engages a number of senses – smell, sight, sound, perhaps touch. So does drinking a glass of wine. So too a fireplace with crackling logs aflame.

If our senses, like all our natural world, are unearned gifts, who may I thank for this donation? If these precious treasures came from an emperor I might pay tribute or bend my knee or write a ballade. If from a nation I might become a citizen. If bestowed by a minister, perhaps I would join their church.

You may say that these are gifts of circumstance. You may say, as Brother David Steindl-Rast does, that they gifts from God, that there has been divine intervention. All I know is that it is too, too easy to take this trove for granted, and sometimes I will just spontaneously spread my arms, look up into the sky, and call out “thank you!” Thank you God, thank you world, thank you grass, thank you sky, thank you, thank you.

If I take a minute, I can easily recall joy I’ve experienced through each of the senses:

• Smell (pine trees; smoke from fireplaces in Angel Fire, New Mexico on a fall evening)
  
• Touch (petting my pup; a warm shirt just out of the dryer)
  
• Tastes (hot coffee first thing in the morning; my wife’s anything she cooks)
  
• Sights (the Grand Tetons; a baby laughing)
• Sounds (a baby laughing – well, yeah; a church organ)

The senses are just five ways to easily access something deeper than fretting about not wearing just the right look to the meeting or what might happen to Fred or Sue on some reality show. Even more, “True joy,” as Steindl-Rast says, “surpasses mere sensuous pleasure. Without ever rejecting our senses we must go beyond them. Sooner or later, our senses wilt and die. True joy lasts” (p. 19).

Our senses put us in touch with the mystery of life, it is up to us to go beyond that touch if we wish to explore, to delve.

Our senses are free, they are gifts, but they are not to be taken for granted.

Thank you eyes. Thank you nose. Thank you skin. Thank you ears. Thank you tongue.

Thank you life, for these treasures which have been given to me.

“…every sensuous experience is at heart a spiritual one, a divine revelation. No matter how we repress this intuition, it is there in every human heart just waiting to be triggered.”

~Br. David Steindl-Rast, A Listening Heart: The Spirituality of Sacred Sensuousness , p. 18

Grateful Living Resources:

• A Network for Grateful Living - http://gratefulness.org/
  
• Want to be happy? Be grateful (D S-R): TEDTalk - https://youtu.be/UtBsl3j0YRQ
  
• Greater Good Website - https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/gratitude