Notes from Wilding Walk with Dora Gaskill:
When does what you’re sensing (smelling, touching, tasting) become a part of you?
“The sum total of my experience of eating a cashew is that I enjoy it, but when I break down all the parts, I don’t enjoy all the parts (e.g. my experience of the smell of raw cashews).” (Zena Bibler)
When we create categories for simplifying our understanding based on our sensory experiences, pleasures and aversions, those predetermined bits of information can narrow down and box in the spectrum of individual decision making possibilities in the world - of the experiences in which we, as sensitive living beings, are willing to partake.
Perhaps its worth it to sit with senses of unpleasantness, discomfort, or aversion, however they land, and to wait them out. Perhaps its worth it to pull apart the sum totals with which we name or define our experiences. What do we humans miss when we turn away from our aversions and discomforts?
It seems that a hierarchy of the senses exists, evolutionarily speaking, where sight is predominantly deemed the most “sophisticated.” But what if we were to dismantle this socialized and institutionalized hierarchy? How can it be reorganized?
“Understanding” could be covert language for “knowing,” or pinning the butterfly to the wall, so to speak. How can we think about “understanding” as sensorily apprehending the world around us, calling us into deeper broader (not more narrow and definitive) experiences?
