Summer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Grandchildren Moon<\/p>\n
Have you ever smelled fresh bees wax?\u00a0 A smell that takes you right to the essence of the natural world.\u00a0 It exudes a sense of well-being, freshness, vitality.\u00a0 I harvested some honey today for the Woolly meal on Monday night.\u00a0 The honey and the honey comb offer that same sensation; perhaps, as latter day Catholics might have said, it is the odor of sanctity.<\/p>\n
The experience this morning took me back to two other smell, for me equally enmeshed with the natural world as our obvious home.\u00a0 The first one, of the longest standing for me, I experience in the\u00a0 produce cooler at Cox’s Supermarket when I worked there as a boy.\u00a0 This smell combined apple scents, oranges, bananas, lettuce, watermelon, whatever was in season into a perfume that drew me back often.\u00a0 I would sneak away from stocking shelves or breaking down boxes, push the plunger that opened the door, step inside and be transported to paradise, a place where everything suggested abundance, nourishment and fine flavor.<\/p>\n
Another one of these scents came to me only this year as I harvested parsnips.\u00a0 Lifting the tapered white parsnip out of the ground, I brought its roots, only just holding the parsnip in its intimate relationship with the soil, to my nose.\u00a0 Ah.\u00a0 Again, freshness, vitality, well-being.\u00a0 It was as if, for a moment, I inhabited the parsnip’s underground world, the place where it truly lived.\u00a0 There, with the scent, I could trace the connections between the parsnip and its source of nutrients in the soil around it; I could feel the back and forth of vegetable and soil as they interacted in a dance older than the oil beneath the Gulf, older than the iron ore on the range.<\/p>\n
Yes, as I think of it, the odor of sanctity is it, exactly.\u00a0 The sacred blossoms into molecules that excite this oldest sense, the one that relates us most closely to the rest of our animal brothers and sisters.\u00a0 The sacred emerges from the sophisticated work of the honey bee turning nectar into honey.\u00a0 The sacred emerges from the fruits of the earth as they await transport to our tables.\u00a0 The sacred emerges within the top layers of\u00a0 soil, that thin web of living things that supports the plants from which we all take our sustenance.\u00a0 Yes, the sacred emerges in these places, and it sends out an aroma to draw attention to itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Grandchildren Moon Have you ever smelled fresh bees wax?\u00a0 A smell that takes you right to the essence of the natural world.\u00a0 It exudes a sense of well-being, freshness, vitality.\u00a0 I harvested some honey today for the Woolly meal on Monday night.\u00a0 The honey and the honey comb offer that same sensation; perhaps, … Continue reading The Odor Of Sanctity<\/span>