We know the five major senses- touch, taste, sight, smell, and hearing- and we know that there are many senses beyond those ones we tend to limit ourselves to- like your sense of pain or temperature. But how many other senses are there? Which one is our sixth sense? In The Deepest Sense , I was most fascinated by the chapter on animals. Because they had a good example for what I believe is the sixth sense that ties society together. That is, one's sense of justice. Justice is something that you perceive, and it is something that is perceived by the rest of nature, or at least our closer relatives in the animal kingdom. In that experiment, one of the monkeys was upset by the injustice of the other monkey getting better treatment. This is the cornerstone of every great society- the distributing proper treatment of people and the earth. When there is great inequality, people rise up, because they sense that justice has failed them. Sure, sensing ghosts is probably the most wel...
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...
Bandit In Spell of the Sensuous , Abram writes: “In indigenous, oral cultures, nature itself is articulate; it speaks. The human voice in an oral culture is always to some extent participant with the voices of wolves, wind, and waves— participant, that is, with the encompassing discourse of an animate earth. There is no element of the landscape that is definitively void of expressive resonance and power.” (75) Being around animals for a long period of time really taught me the truth of this idea. Animals develop their own language (and I don’t use that term lightly). They are capable of lying or misleading you, which suggests that they can tell when someone knows them well. They can recognize people as members of their flock just as readily as other sheep or goats. The line between humans and other animals is much more permeable than we might imagine. Lady At twelve, I began volunteering at a farm. It was situated on two hundred acres of forests and pastures. I worked in t...
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