Yesterday was a beautiful day and finally I got to be outside all day. When its nice out i love to walk around barefoot all day and yesterday for the first time this year i was able to do so. It got me thinking though a lot about touch, and the fact that we always have shoes or socks on our feet, especially when we are outside. I wonder if this has effected us in any ways at all. Think about it most animals walk on all fours, and even monkeys use their paws a good deal of the time to walk. Are we denying ourselves the ability to feel the world to its fullest extent by constantly blocking our feet from touching the earth? are we depriving ourself of a more spiritual connection to the world by not allowing our feet to connect with the earth? This makes me think of how good it feels to have your feet in fresh grass, or in sand, there is definitely something calming about it, and i think we should do it more.
What's a nard, and what does it smell like?
What a google search revealed a nard to be Starting on Valentine’s Day, we started reading The Aroma of Righteousness by Deborah Green, explores the imagery of fragrance in rabbinic literature. Two months later, we had Dr. Rachel Herz from Brown give a lecture on her work unraveling the neural processes of olfaction and gustation. The readings and lecture gave the class a well-rounded understanding at how scent is employed in ritual for invoking emotion. As mentioned earlier, our sense of smell is the most memorable due to its proximity to the pre-frontal cortex. Although research behind this phenomenon is relatively recent, practitioners of religion understand the influence of associating scents with divine concepts. In her introduction, Green mentions how we lack a vocabulary to describe our sense of smell, and refer to such using simile, metaphor or simply naming the scent. The explanation for such is that the olfactory bulb is located so “far down” that the circuitry co...
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