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.
Naming Scents: The Ambiguous Nature of Describing Smell
It is really difficult to name smells without just saying the thing that produces a smell. We don’t really have words for smells specifically. A floral scent is called that because it smells like flowers, “floral” is not its own word specifically for the scent. This becomes especially apparent when reading the names of candles and perfumes. For example, I own a perfume named “Velvet Moon”. That name has nothing to do with what it smells like, and yet I personally think it is aptly named. The perfume smells like cardamom, mahogany, beeswax, and black pepper. Is that what the moon or velvet smells like? Almost certainly not. But the words used to describe the scent have given me the association between those scents, velvet, and the moon. This is also true when the name of a scent doesn’t match what mid tells you something should smell like. There is a Yankee candle called “By the Pool” that is amber and coconut scented. That notably is not what pools smell like, so while the scent itself...
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