Inhale

Inhale

My brother has a better sniffer than I. I remember him, as a small child, sorting clean laundry by smell. A dog’s sense of smell is 10,000 times more powerful than a human’s. My wife and I joke that whenever our dog stops to sniff something, he is picking up his voicemail. In the same way that you and I get nuanced information from the message someone leaves on our phone, our dog is picking up detailed information through smell. In the scent of another animal’s urine, a dog can detect its sex, size, age, diet, and emotional state. A male dog can smell a female dog in heat five miles away. This capacity in dogs explains why they are used for tracking, and why some dogs are being trained to sniff out cancer. They can smell cancer cells long before the most sensitive laboratory instruments can detect them.

Of all our senses, smell is the most primal, its receptors deepest in the brain. (The receptors in the back of the nose are basically attached to the front of your brain.) This is why it is so evocative for us. For many people who devote little attention to smell, its potentialities for supporting well-being are under-utilized. A small amount of fragrance, either perfume or dog droppings, will shape our mood profoundly. Spend a little bit of time exploring your sense of smell, and how it impacts your mood state. The smell of freshly ground coffee? The smell of a pond deep in the forest? The smell of an antique rose? There are so many remarkable botanicals from around the world with marvelous odors. Many of us are familiar with lavender, rosemary, jasmine, gardenia. But what about copal? Palo Santo? Breuzinho? Balsam Fir? Get a diffuser (or make one), and put in several drops of essential oil to transform a room. Take a smell tour of your house (after you clean.) Consider dried flowers, pine boughs, wood shavings. Think about walking into an old cabin in the woods–the marvel of that smell. Smell operates in the background, so consider the landscape of smells in your spaces, and how you could shape it.

One of the strangest, most comforting, and remarkable things I’ve smelled in the last two years was a piece of a squirrel’s nest made from shredded redwood bark I encountered on a camping trip. It blended the scent of redwood with baby squirrel musk. I can see the description on a cologne. A year later it retains this wild and woodsy odor, taking me right back to the moment I picked it up in the Santa Cruz mountains and inhaled, suddenly and unexpectedly cradled in mama squirrel’s armpit.