I am convinced that there is a smell to each season, each month.

Why else does my body vividly remember the events of these weeks, last year, every time a breeze blows through? The places that it stood, the hands it held, the coffees and green teas that it clutched for warmth. I think I could tell you the month just by feeling the air.

Today it felt like November for the first time.

PETRICHOR

I walked out of lecture this morning and right into the pouring rain. The theatrics were in full swing: college kids running for cover, pushing each other over as they competed to pile through the doorframes, out of the apparent acid falling from the sky and into the comfort of drywall and blasted heat. Because, yes, in San Diego, they turn the heat on if it drops below seventy degrees outside.

So I’m standing on the stairwell, raindrops falling on my bare legs, watching Southern California dance in a panic, and thinking ever so strangely about petrichor.

What is petrichor? The smell of rain. But if you want to be that person at the dinner party, it stems from the Greek words “petra”, meaning stone, and “ichor”, referring to the blood of the immortal gods in Greek mythology. Meaning, rain is the blood, the nourishing life force, of our world. We need it. We entered into a relationship with this planet the day we took our first, frantic breath upon it.

A relationship that I am only just recently coming to scientifically understand.

This is about that.

NATURE & SPIRITUALITY

One of the most memorable classes I took in college was a nature and spirituality course that met outside in the grass. We would all gather, meditate under the trees, and then discuss readings from Joanna Macy and Robin Wall Kimmerer, as business and engineering students walked by and gawked at the shenanigans that the humanities department gets away with. Classic.

Anyway, it was taught by this eccentrically brilliant woman who was, I am ninety-nine percent sure, a full-fledged socialist on a mission to indoctrinate the youth, but she did have some beautiful insight regarding the earth. She taught us that our bodies release oxytocin when we smell dirt, bonding us with the planet, with our first mother.

TO SPEAK FOR THE TREES

Coincidentally, I just finished reading Diana Beresford-Kroeger‘s To Speak for the Trees, where she writes that there is Celtic word called mothaitheacht that refers to a feeling in the upper chest of some kind of energy or sound passing through you when near trees. She explains that the Celts believed that some people were more able to feel it than others, allowing them to feel the presence of the earth around them in higher proportions.

She also, and I am not quite sure how I have never heard of this, writes:

“Plants contain the sucrose version of serotonin as a working molecule. It is a water-soluble compound in, say, a tree. Serotonin is a neuro-generator. By proving that the tryptophan-tryptamine pathways existed in trees, I proved that trees possess all the same chemicals we have in our brains. Trees have the neural ability to listen and think; they have all the component parts necessary to have a mind or consciousness. That’s what I proved: that forests can think and perhaps even dream.”

-Diana Beresford-Kroeger, To Speak for the Trees

I’ve known, thanks to Bill Hayes and Oliver Sacks in Insomniac City, that trees physically mirror our flesh. Their branches resemble neurons, their leaves veins. But this is extraordinarily brand new to me. For trees to not just share our structure, but something of our psychological blueprint, our chemicals and messy things, and for us to be able to sense this through mothaitheacht, that’s radical.

CULTIVATING CONNECTION

This might all sound crazy to you, but as someone who grew up with a mother who pressed my little palms to the sides of trees and showed me how to take off my shoes and walk barefoot through the grass any chance she got, always telling me to notice how it feels, it makes sense to me. I see now that my mother was cultivating a flame of mothaitheacht within me, a flame that would burn brighter and brighter the more that I needed it to as the years unfolded.

For when I was badly heartbroken for the first time, I sat under the trees all summer, never quite sure why their presence was so soothing. They seemed to know things, my things, and to understand them. Beresford-Kroeger sheds concrete, scientific light onto why and what she was able to find will never not enchant me.

I think it’s why I spent the nights of my adolescence roaming the neighborhood at dusk, tears rolling my face as the black birds flew over my head and into the falling sun, just beyond the skeletal branches of the trees I grew up under. I thought I was just dramatic, crazy, overly-emotional. Normal people don’t cry at such things.

NORMAL PEOPLE

But then I grew up to realize that normal people are boring.

For if being coolly indifferent to the sight of the black birds against an orange soda sky or the smell of rain on your college campus constitutes normal, than we should all be running as fast as we can from it. Our bodies, as has now been scientifically proven, are hardwired to know and understand this planet. We evolved alongside it, adapting to it’s conditions and patterns. It’s in our bones, passed down from our ancestors like family secrets, so that even if your mother never pressed your palms to the naked flesh of a birch or told you how to listen to the ocean, there is a part of you that knows.

I suppose the point is that I grew up thinking this was all a bit out there, a bit hippie-dippie, the kind of thing that people would look twice at you for. But now there is all of this science and all of these big, beautiful words that give academic validity to the things I have always felt, but have never had the words for.

So yes, I walked out of class today and into the rain and it felt a bit like how I imagine it must feel to be religious, bound by invisible thread to something much larger than your ever-evolving understanding of it. I think we need that.

Love, M.

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