Aromatica Poetica

 

It’s easy to take magic for granted when it’s right under our nose. Our senses are a complex and fantastic gateway to perceiving the world. Countless hidden processes are at play: nerves, cells, and unique apparatus refined by evolution and still in process. Through our senses we communicate to each other and to the life around us: micro-expression, pheromones, and countless subtleties read by countless nervous systems.

One can wonder why this phantasmagoria of data and feelings exists? One view is that living beings are tentacles reaching out and experiencing the world for the purpose of informing the life that is behind all of life of what the world is. If that were so then we may ask, what are we feeding back to life about the world? What if we made this communication conscious and choose to interpret what comes through us with wonder and appreciation?

A way to hone the senses is to take time for each, a moment to just listen, a moment to just feel through the skin, a moment to just taste. The hidden surprise in such a practice is wonder and the realization that being alive (with nothing added) is enough. Life has innate value.

Aromatica Poetica is a project created by Knowing's guest writer, blind author M. Leona Godin. She calls it a laboratory for the advancement of taste and smell which combines our love of literature with our love of smell and taste in a colossal endeavor to promote and celebrate the oft-neglected senses. Her project is full of essays, stories & poems, interviews, and reviews that engage with smell and taste through a variety of lenses including the literary, artistic, and scientific. For the Knowing podcast’s episode The Art & Alchemy of Transmutation, our friend Chocolate George reads her writing on alchemy with a spirit none but George could. It’s one of those, you just gotta hear it kind of thing. You can hear it (with those senses) here, the question is how will you experience hearing it?

Listen to The Art & Alchemy of Transmutation on Knowing

Leona writing has appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, and Catapult. She’s a is a New York Public Library Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellow and creator of Aromatica Poetica.