Page 21 - ECOlogic Book

The Scent of Wildness
(Spring, 1991)

The rock bottom foundation of the technique for achieving the power
of non-violence is belief in the essential oneness of all life. Ghandi

Two incidents during the winter holidays made me aware of how closely we
remain linked to our wildness. The first one occurred at the restaurant
where we were having brunch. When my future daughter-in-law returned
from the restroom, she announced, “Smells like a grandmother in there!”

As I am about to become an instant grandmother, I began to wonder about
that distinctive “grandmother” smell. Is it a good smell or a bad smell, I
wondered. Assuming I would be the last to know, I wondered if I was
beginning to smell that way yet, or if I would magically begin to smell like a
grandmother in June, when my son plans to marry the mother of two
children.

I began to worry about this a lot, and my concern was confirmed later the
same week, when my six year old incipient granddaughter picked up a book
and smelled it. On the cover of the book was the face of a very old,
wrinkled and wise woman – obviously a grandmother. I asked the child how
the book smelled and she said lightly, “OK”, and then returned to the serious
business of gift unwrapping, leaving me to continue my ruminations.

I thought about the link between the sense of smell and our wildness. I
remembered the movie Firstborn, in which the star, the progeny of a human
father and gorilla mother, was completely human in every way, except for
his “giveaway” trait: he smelled everything, suggesting that he had not
totally lost contact with his wildness.

The sense of smell, perhaps the most ancient of the five senses, is, in the
human, the weakest one, atrophied by centuries of civilization. Other
species rely on the olfactory sense for the discernment of territorial
boundaries, the selection and attraction of a mate, finding prey, and warning
of the presence of enemies. Now, in the human, it appears to be used
primarily for the detection of grandmothers.

And yet, this “weakest” sense may be our closest link to our wildness.
Certainly the sense of smell is most evocative of memory. Can it be our link
to species memory as well? The smell of earth in spring, the smell of a

21