Sense-sational Fun
Use Your Senses To Bridge The Personal And The Impersonal, The individual And The Universal.
Photo by Vika Glitter, Pexels.com.
Key Assertions: Being an extension of the chain that connects us to other people and the environment, our senses reach far beyond us. The senses bridge the personal and the impersonal, the individual with the universal. Each sense preserves each other sense by solving the problem of not having the other. You can also enliven your experiences by looking for curiosities and patterns as you seek attractive natural beings.
To continue down this leg of the Heartwood Path is to experience sense-ational fun. Each sense contributes to the richness of one’s experience of life:
Smell. When one’s olfactory nerves detect something—i.e. during a float trip, sex, or eating—they trigger the cerebral cortex and send messages straight to the limbic system (which is a network of structures in the brain involved in memory and emotions).
Touch. Your skin is really the only thing that stands––not very effectively–– between you and the environment, between your own body with that which is considered the environment. The significance of touch is more than skin deep. Touch is the first sense that develops in the womb, it helps build social relationships, it can be used to heal or abuse, it stimulates brain growth and helps one cope, it brings forth psychological closeness, it helps the one doing the touching and the one being touched, it can establish or break boundaries, and it helps us survive and live well.
Hearing. Sounds, unlike visual colors and tasty foods, do not blend well inside us. We want to sort them out. Perhaps this is a defense mechanism: to make sure the sound of swishing prairie grasses does not also contain the purr of a lion, for example. Along with protecting us, sounds convey a wide range of emotions. The sound of one’s mantra utterances provides a link between Interiority and Exteriority. The sound of mantric utterances encapsulates how one feels and thinks. Words may carry to the Exterior the thoughts and feelings one has on the Interior. These words are limited by the nature of the humans that produced them. We will be focusing most on how the mantric sounds (not the words) convey feelings and spiritual revelations and not so much on the concepts that the linguistic translations of the sounds present to our Ego-driven, concept-producing minds.
Seeing. Seventy percent of the body’s sense receptors are in the eyes. Therefore, it is mainly through the eyes that one contacts and understands the Realm of Exteriority.
Our senses reach far beyond us. They are an extension of the chain that connects us to other people and to the environment as a whole. They bridge the personal and the impersonal, the individual with the universe.
The senses and the Soul cure each other. They are mutually healing. They each solve the problem of not having the other. The senses and the Soul preserve each other.
Treat yourself to a variety of sensual treats—different smells, different textures, different visual patterns, and different foods. Consider using a blindfold and try to distinguish what you are experiencing without the use of your eyes.
You can also enliven your experiences by looking for curiosities and patterns as you seek attractive natural beings for the activities of this course. To facilitate this enlivening, return to the following activity throughout your pilgrimage down the Heartwood Path.
Photo by Maksim Goncharenok, P\exels.com.
HumaNatureConnect Activity
Enlivening Your Experiences
For this activity, look for and check off patterns and curiosities in nature. You do not have to find all the patterns listed below at once. Come back to this activity whenever you feel like varying the types of connection beings. Doing so may help you find new attractive natural beings for your HumanNature Connect Activities and teach you how to diversify what you observe in nature. To avoid naming or having to identify the beings in this activity you can simply write down where you can return to the being for future connection experiences. For pictures of what the beings look like, go to the Nature Handbook by Ernest H. Williams, Jr. (2005).
Look for the most showy flowers, such as wild passionflower or fairy slipper orchid. Among my favorite showy flowers are: ________________________________________________.
Look for ray or disk flowers such as dandelions or fleabane. Among my favorite ray or disk flowers are: ________________________________________________.
Look for the most inconspicuous flowers such as sagebrush, maple or smooth brome grass. Among my favorite inconspicuous flowers are: ________________________________________________.
Notice the timing of flowers in a meadow, probably an adaptation to avoid competition. Write out the sequencing of flowers during the growing season. ______________________________________________.
Look for early blooming forest wildflowers such as Dutchman’s breeches and bloodroot. Among my favorite forest flower are: _______________________________________.
Look for winged seeds such as red maple, cottonwood, and milkweed. Among my favorite winged seeded plants are: _________________________________________________.
Look for burs or stickseeds such as burdock or sandbur. I am attracted to the following burs and stickseeds:_______________________________________.
Look for fleshy fruits such as honeysuckle, holly, and raspberry. I am attracted to the following fleshy fruited plants:_________________________________.
Look for stored nuts such as the acorns of oaks or the nuts of hickory trees. I am attracted to the following stored nuts:________________________________.
Look for ballistic seeds (those that throw their seed) such as orange jewelweed (also known as Touch-Me-Nots) and wild geranium. I am attracted to the following plants that practice ballistic seeding:_________________________________.
Look for seeds that can bury themselves through a twisting action such as seed heads and needle grass. I am attracted to the following twisting seeds: _________________________________.
Look for a forest that is mostly deciduous and one that is mostly evergreen. I am attracted the following deciduous forests: _____________________and the following evergreen forests:_____________________________________.
Look for a very broad tree and a very tall tree: I am attracting the following broad trees:_________________________and the following tall trees_________________________________.
Look for a very old tree. I am attracted to the following old trees: _________________________________.
Look at trees with different types of bark, such as smooth-bark beeches, the furrowed bark black locusts, shag bark hickories, and peeling bark birches. I am attracted to the bark of the following trees: __________________________________________.
Look for trees with flaring trunks (buttresses) near the ground such as bald cypress and American beeches. I am attracted to the following trees with buttresses:___________________________________________.
Look for different shaped leaves such as the toothed leaves of beeches, the palmately-lobed leaves of the sugar maple, the compound leaves of ash trees, and mitten or variable shaped leaves of sassafras trees. I am attracted to the leaves on the following trees:_______________________________________
Look for shade trees. I am attracted to the following shade trees:_______________________________.
Look for trees that retain their leaves in the winter such as the red oak. I am attracted to the following leaf-retaining trees:______________________________________.
Pay attention to how long the pine trees in your area hold their needles (some last two years, others for decades) Notice how pine trees have large woody female pine cones and small pale male cones at the tips of the branches. Notice also the variety of pine cones, big and small, open and closed. I am attracted to the following pine trees: __________________________.
Look for plants with hairy leaves, such as the blazing star, common mullein, and New England aster. My favorite hairy-leafed plant is: _______________________________.
Watch out for spines, thorns, and prickles, such as those on cacti, roses, and locust trees. I am attracted to the following thorny plants:________________________________.
Look for plants with resins and waxes such as pine trees, junipers, and blue spruces. I am attracted to the following plants with resins or waxes:_______________________________.
Look for plants with swellings on their stems called “galls,”which are “active growth responses of plants to the presence of insect eggs and larvae” (Williams, 2005, p. 49).
Look for leaf mines. Blotches or serpentine trails within a leaf reveal the presence of leaf-mining larval insects. Mines are pale in color because the leaf mines have consumed the leaf tissue. Leaf mines are made by the larvae of tiny moths, flies, beetles . . I am attracted to the following leaf mine patterns I have witnessed:___________________________________.
Look for spirals on plants such as giant sunflowers. I am attracted to the following plants showing the results of the Fibonacci Sequence and the golden ration in the spirals they exhibit: ____________________________________________.
Look for lenticels (raised dots, ovals and lines) that contribute to a rough texture to the uniform surfaces of plants with otherwise smooth bark, such as cherry trees, pear trees, and paper birch trees. I am attracted to the patterns made by lenticels on the following trees:___________________________________________.
Look for carnivorous plants such as the purple pitcher plant, the round-leaved sundew, and the Venus flytrap. I am attracted to the following flesh-eating plants:_____________________________________.
Look for parasitic plants such as the white paintbrush, the clustered broomrape, larkspur, and Indian pipe. I am attracted to the following parasitic plants.
Look for solar-tracking flowers such as little sunflowers and subalpine buttercups. I am attracted to the following solar-tracking flowers:___________________________________________.
Look for animals with iridescence such as the shells of abalones, or the bark-gnawing beetle. My favorite iridescent animals are: _____________________________________.
Look for animals with bioluminescence such as fireflies and glow worms.
Look for animals with camouflage or cryptic coloration such as the tulip-tree beauty moth and the pika (a small mammal).
Look for animals such as the octopus, the catfish, the yellow perch, and the sanderling with countershading (dark tops and light bottoms), adaptions that makes the animals less visible to predators. I am attracted to the following animals with countershading: ______________________________.
Look for animals with disruptive coloration that is useful in hiding from predators, such as the spots on your white-tailed deer and the color blotches on copperhead snakes. I am attracted to the following animals with disruptive coloration:_________________________________.
Look for animals with eye spot (four-eye butterflyfish) or false head colorations (spicebush swallowtail)--both used to confuse predators. I am attracted to the following animals with false head or eye spot colorations: ______________________________________.
Look for animals such as skunks with warning colorations. I am attracted to the following animals with warning colorations:_________________________________.
Look for animals with disguise colorations such as the greater angle-wing katydid or treehoppers. I am attracted to the following animals with disguise colorations:_______________________________ .
Look for the smallest mammal, the largest mammal, the smallest bird, the largest bird, and the smallest reptile and the largest reptile you can find. Which of these do I find most attractive? ____________________________________.
Look for animals that shiver, pant, or visit salt licks. Which of these do I find most attractive? ____________________________________.
Look for animals with hard solid antlers (deer, elk, moose) hard hollow horns (mountain goat and big horn sheep). Which of these do I find most attractive?____________________________________.
Look for animals with misleading displays such as a killdeer (which feigns injury to lure predators away from its nest) and skunks and eastern hognose snakes (which both play dead). Which of these do I find most attractive? ____________________________________.
Look for birds with various bills and beaks and birds with various wing shapes and tail shapes. Which of these do I find most attractive?____________________________________.
Notice how male birds are often more brightly colored than the females of their species (especially cardinals, wood ducks and painted buntings). Which of these do I find most attractive?____________________________________.
Notice which baby birds are helpless at birth (robins, for example) and which baby birds are immediately capable of feeding for itself (snowy plovers, for example). Which of these do I find most attractive? ____________________________________.
Notice the various calls of birds. Which of these do I find most attractive? ____________________________________.
Notice which birds get mobbed (hawks, for example) and which birds do the mobbing of other birds (crows, for example). Which of these do I find most attractive? ____________________________________.
Notice which birds soar (hawks, for example), which first fly in V formation (Canada geese, for example), and which birds fly in large flocks (snow geese, for example). Which of these do I find most attractive?____________________________________.
Notice which kind of butterflies form puddle clubs when they feed (swallowtails and white admiral butterflies, for example). Which of these do I find most attractive? ____________________________________.
Look for insect nymphs, larvae, inch worms, spun silken cocoons, naked larvae chrysalids, or insects that shed their exoskeletons (cicadas and stoneflies), and caterpillar webs, anthills, and wasp nests. Which of these do I find most attractive? ____________________________________.
Look for soil tubes such as those made by moles. Which of these do I find most attractive? ____________________________________.
Look for fall leaf colors, regrowth after fires, bark galleries (tunnels under the bark of trees caused by bark beetles, bark rubs caused by deer as part of the mating ritual and trees marked by beavers, bears, and bison. Which of these do I find most attractive? ____________________________________.
Look for holes on trees caused by woodpeckers and sapsuckers. Which of these do I find most attractive? ____________________________________.
Look for forest shelf fungi, grass runways, bubble masses (such as those formed by spittle bugs), fairy rings (the visible above ground reproductive structures––” mushrooms”–– of the unseen below ground fugal filaments that grow outward in all directions), and the variety of spider web patterns. Which of these do I find most attractive? ____________________________________.
Along the coasts, look for the intertidal life zones (from the high zone rich in barnacles to the low zone rich in a form of algae known as “kelp”), look for the variability in the tide pools (as a result of salinity, temperature, and sun exposure), look for sand dune zones, look for life in the sand, and look for marsh zones and salt pan depressions. Which of these do I find attractive? ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––.
