Smells and Bells

Sweets are known to be one of the most indulgent flavors humans long for. We make sure to save room in our stomachs during a meal so we can treat ourselves with having our last bite of food being dessert. An important mantra my grandmother used to share is, “Eat dessert first, life is short,” suggesting that we deserve sweets before the nutrition of our actual meal. We call it one of our comfort food and it seems to cure any wrongdoing, like how ice cream and chocolate can fix emotional turmoil. We eat sweets when we’re feeling distraught, lost, and empty and use them to fill ourselves. Sugar can be known to heal burns on your tongue after taking a sip of a hot beverage. And we especially know that sugar can mask bitter, unpleasant tastes, and so we use it to help “the medicine go down.” By this logic, sugar is good for us as it can help us get physically and mentally better.   We also use the word sweet to describe things that aren't food, like people and feelings. W...

http://m5.paperblog.com/i/71/714671/interesting-psak-no-candy-man-no-throwing-can-L-4eXirb.jpeg Growing up Jewish, I remember my seventh grade year as being scattered with the Bar and Bat Mitzvahs of many of my classmates, both from Hebrew School and from my regular school class. I'm sure many others also remember getting dressed up on Saturday morning, going to synagogue, listening to a friend chant in Hebrew for a couple hours, and then later that day going to a big party at a local country club or somewhere. One of the many traditions that take place throughout the day is the throwing of the candy. This takes place after the Bar/Bat Mitzvah has just finished reading their Torah and Havtorah sections. The audience takes out the individually wrapped circular gummy candies and (hopefully) gently lobs them over the crowd and at the 13 year old at the front. Once the bombardment ends, the younger children dash to the front and collect as much candy as they can to quietly munc...

Religious beliefs and public health today often find themselves at odds. Because of a tendency to associate religious people with everything from abstinence-only education to opposing vaccinations, it is easy to see faith as an obstacle to public health. However, the translation we read of the First Gate paints a very different picture. I enjoyed this reading because I immediately saw a clear connection with my major. Most people today credit John Snow as the founder of the modern field of public health. He mapped out the spread of cholera and found that it was concentrated in specific groups of people that got their water from the same wells. Today we know that bacteria live in that water, and when people drank it they became infected. This was a landmark discovery and he was a very smart man, but I am not sure he actually founded modern public health. One of the key tenants to the field is disease prevention and overall population health. These were achieved all the way back in the m...

Sunday morning I had a conversation with my friend and we casually talked about how our days were going. He almost immediately began by telling me of the horrible stench he faced upon walking into the hallway of his building. It was after a long weekend of neighbors and visitors drinking while lounging on the couches outside of his room. He described the smell as "putrid" and went on to describe it as a terrible combination of vomit and lacrosse equipment from the athletic team down the hall. As he went on to describe this unspeakable smell, his tone was of awe and bitterness. It seemed to have ruin his whole morning despite it having just begun. I was interested in whether it was the fact that it was his own place of living that was partially vandalized that gave him such an emotional reaction, or if the smell itself had resonated and evoked emotion on its own. Nonetheless, if the hallway was a mess but smelt pleasant, I'm sure he would only be mildly irritated. Bu...

Honeycomb s "Taste and see that the Lord is sweet"  Depending on the translation, God's sweetness flows from him like honey, an oozing sweetness that could mean bliss or joy, but could also be literally translated to sweetness. With the satiability of God's words and presence being connected to only sweetness, while things that may bring harm to us are considered bitter. What's interesting to me is the delectability of God despite his power and wrath. Where is the sweetness when he induces the flood? Would we every consider God any other flavors or tastes? To connect this back to what the author said about taste being a matter of perspective. Rachel Fulton also noted how sweetness can be seen as juvenile, with the connotations as follows could be perceiving the person tasting as immature.  Further elaborating on this idea that Bernard of Clarivaux introduced of our palate being tainted by the serpent's poison, providing a loss of tastes of goodne...

When I was a little kid I was terrified of dogs. I was scared of all animals, really, but being debilitating afraid of a pet found in many houses and any park became a real challenge. My parents took me to some kind of doctor who told me to take medicine that came out of a blue tube as white little balls, I was to take two or three of these under my tongue every morning. To my great seven-year-old surprise, the “medicine” was sweet! It tasted like little sugar pills. At the time, I was delighted. Taking medicine was usually a chore, but these pills were almost a treat. As a gold older and learned about things like placebos and “sugar pills,” I thought for sure my parents were trying to trick me. I thought by the nature of their sweetness they couldn’t have any healing properties, they must have just been to make me think I was getting over my fears. Credit: https://www.amazon.com/Boiron-Symphytum-Officinale-Homeopathic-Medicine/dp/B00014FG0O In more recent years I’ve run into t...

From head shops to tea stores, incense has taken on a new role in society as a way to cleanse and express spirituality. Incense began as a sacrificial offering to God that was used as or with prayer but now when I consider incense, there is a more spiritual vibe rather than religious. I associate incense with spirituality but more along the lines of meditation or even witchcraft. A friend of mine is educated in the field of witchcraft and spirituality and has told me a little about her use of incense. Incense can be burned to please spirits or being from the otherside using incense but can also be used to cleanse an area of evil spirits. The burning of these aromatic plant materials and essential oils can have a multitude of uses but its ability to attract and also send away different spirits interests me. Incense is also seen now as more a statement than anything spiritual or religious at all. Many of the people I know who regularly use incense use it as a personal cleanse or just be...

People gravitate towards food. Food unites our body in a biological way but also in a social way. It seems today that in a social setting amongst my friends, food is most likely around or the focal point of an event. The eating and tasting of the food seems to be mindless when I think of it as just eating. I recall last winter when a  friend and I during a winter storm were sick of chase food so we decided to try to go to  the the local grocery store. I felt like the video below really encapsulated our experience. Even though the weather was too bad for us to drive anywhere, the thought of food made us make questionable decisions. The tastes for certain foods drove us to act on this feeling. The significance of this story is that it was endlessly entertaining trying to get the car to move out of it's snow filled parking spot. Taste and food created an experience that did not even end with eating food, thats how powerful the sense of taste is.

Hearing is one of the senses that is very important to daily rituals of the church. Confession: When an individual confesses their sins to a priest privately. The priest can not repeat what that individual said to anyone. It is like a cleansing of the soul. The priest can not repeat what has been said to anyone. As you say your sins out loud you are being washed clean again. Music: During every mass songs are chosen for specific times. We sing as the priest and the alter servers go down the aisle and as they leave. We sing when we are receiving communion. We also sing certain prayers or hymns during mass. Marriage vows: The vows of marriage in the Catholic Church are supposed to be sacred. If a couple end up getting divorced the church wont see them as ever being married. When the vows are said they are said in front of God. You are making a vow and a promise to God and the people watching. You will cherish and be loyal to this person standing across from you Confirmation: ...

 Suggested to listen with headphones.  Sounds of increasing frequency to test the listener's ability to hear particular pitches. Ranging from 20 Hertz to 16000 Hertz. The higher the pitch, the less likely it is for people to hear it.  Something interesting about hearing, and all of the senses in general, is how our choices can impact how we experience them. Unpacking this more, the choices we make can alter how we hear and that's something that I think is incredibly interesting. Being in a concert for extended periods of time can severely damage your hearing yet we do it anyway. It's interesting how our body cannot communicate  the distress we put in under.  Conceptually it's interesting. When we think of putting our bodies at risk for a thrill you think of skydiving or looking at the sun: an external concern is what we think about. When we think of risk and danger, we thin more corporally, what's on the outside. But when do we think about our ea...

Blog 2 The sixth sense is always a big question.  After all, technically what is the sixth sense. Is it a farce or is it just intuition or plain old luck?  Due to my fears and apprehension of all para natural or phoneomana, I do not have the sixth sense which I am very relieved.  After all our readings on this, I also believe that one has to really believe in it.             It is often said that when you are asleep you are closed to dead. That sentence resonates with me. At the age of fourteen my beloved uncle lost the battle to cancer and passed away. Distraught and depressed I longed for the day to see him again. Sure enough months after his passing he appeared in my dream. It was a fleeting dream that I barely remember but I feel like that is his way of visiting me. For me , this specific visit and others similar that have occured completely make me happy and warm.        ...

Would rabbis and priests associate the same thing to the same smell? This question got me thinking. Got me thinking about how people form different associations to different things, whether it's objects, certain types of people, or smells. Associations come from people's experiences and everyone has different experiences. Children who have gone through traumatic experiences will have very  different associations than children who live a sheltered life. An example might be a child who was abused by a man who smelled like pine trees will create a negative connection with that smell. However, a child who was taken on happy family camping trips might create a more positive association with that same smell. To answer the question, I don't think they would. I don't think that rabbis and priests, generally speaking, would associate smells in the same way. They grow up associating the world around them to the religion they practice and making sense of their world through...

https://www.amazon.com/Alive-Inside-Dan-Cohen/dp/B00OPCF3EW When my grandmother was first diagnosed with dementia, my mother began researching the topic as a coping method but also because she wanted to be prepared for what was to come. She came upon a documentary called “Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory” which tells the story of the nonprofit organization Music and Memory providing music therapy for dementia patients. The documentary tells the stories of several patients and how the music therapy helped patients who had become catatonic be brought to life by the music of their past. We soon tested out this effect of music on dementia with my grandmother and found the connection between music and memory to be incredibly significant. As soon as the song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” by Dawn featuring Tony Orlando came on, it was like someone had opened a window and my grandmother took her first breath of fresh air in months. She instantly began humming and ...

Sound lets us travels to other places and times, while remaining physically present. There are certain songs that I hear and immediately transport me to a place or a past memory. Music takes over us, it flows deep within us, starting with the rhythmic beats of our hearts. When we connect to a song and let it enter our soul, the song becomes us. I have a distinct memory of a James Taylor song called “ sweet baby James ” that immediately makes me think of my parents. It fills my whole body with joy, and I feel like my parents are right there listing to the song with me. Whenever I hear Joni Mitchells “ California ” I can feel the windy roads of northern California and my whole family crammed into one car. Music allows for magic to happen. and has the ability to transcend time and places. https://www.pinterest.com/jstregles/birds-and-eggs/?autologin=true Music is not the only sound that effects people. There is so much sound in nature that people feel connect...

From https://www.theodysseyonline.com/synesthesia-hear-colors The desire to alter perception and consciousness is not unique to humans. Cats feast on catnip until they get loopy and birds get tipsy off fermenting berries. As we learned from our guest speaker, many animals are just as prone to addiction as humans are. Alcohol, cocaine, opiates, nicotine, and many other mind-altering substances have the same appeal to animals as they do to humans. However, we also learned from our guest speaker that there is one important exception: hallucinogens. In a lab, a rat that is given a hallucinogen will not return to it the same way it would with most other drugs that humans use recreationally. One explanation is that these drugs are simply not addictive and so the animals sees no point in pursuing it. But this does nothing to explain why humans actively seek out hallucinogens, and why we are the only species that appears to want to use them over and over again. Why does the same subs...