How to Use Your Nose to Find Your Way Home
Practicing smelling and living a poetic life
Muddy Knees and Wet Feet
In a long-ago life, I was a park ranger helping kids fall in love with the wild.
We learned through our bodies: salamanders slipping through our fingers, tectonic plates traced in dirt, water tables crafted with muddy feet.
Everything was hands-on.
We stomped, rolled, trolloped, and meandered through meadows and caves.
We held tarantulas and turtles, cockroaches and snakes.
I loved watching wonder bloom for my kids.
Jamal
Jamal was eleven the first time he stepped into the woods.
His class came on a grant-funded series of field trips, one of the few programs trying to get kids out of concrete and into the trees.
His Cleveland neighborhood was a place where even dandelions had to fight through sidewalk cracks.
While the other kids shrieked about spiders and smeared mud on each other, Jamal led with his nose.
Jamal smelled everything.
Bark, moss, leaf litter, stream stones. He pressed his face into the forest like he was trying to memorize it.
“This tree smells like the library,” he said. “The water smells stinky, like dirt.”
And then:
“It smells…green.”
My sense?
He’d caught a memory he never lived, but already knew.
The Bat Cave Game
One of my favorite lessons to teach was about bats.
Some species live in colonies of millions.
Mothers leave each night to feed, and when they return, they find their pup in the chaos using only scent and sound.
Each mother-baby pair has a unique chemical and vocal signature.
Scent is how they survive.
To teach this, we played the Bat Cave Game.
Each pair of kids got a vial of a specific scent: lemon, cedarwood, vanilla, peppermint.
Both kids put on blindfolds.
Baby bats held scent caps.
Mama bats held the matching vial. Then we mixed them all up.
Chaos ensued: shrieking, chirping, wild flailing, a cloud of aromas hanging thick in the field, er, the cave.
But Jamal didn’t rush.
He moved slowly, nose tilted, alert.
He sniffed, paused, moved on.
When he found his baby bat, he threw his arms in the air and shouted, “I found my baby!”
His joy was deep, mammalian, and contagious.
Because smell is presence, and as Jamal showed me, it is also ecstasy.
Coming Home
Take a deep breath.
Breathe deeper.
What do you smell?
Smell anchors you in the here and now.
But it also calls you back to a place in your body where memory and emotion are tangled, tender, and alive.
How Do We Smell?
Ever wonder how you perceive smell?
Why does the scent of onions simmering smell good to most people? Or the scent of bacon frying, coffee dripping?
How does the smell of an apple permeate your nose and enter your brain, where you immediately recognize its scent, where a memory or an association comes up?
Scent is both poetic and scientific.
You perceive the aromas of thousands of substances, and make discernments about what is good for you.
Smell the milk, and it's sour? Not good for you.
Smell a rose and want to press your face deeply into her velvet petals until the core of her consumes you, the essence of beauty and magic, divine?
Yep, that's great.
Your nostrils both contain the olfactory epithelium, a small patch of tissue high up in the nasal cavity.
Each of the epithelial cells receives the chemical signatures of scent, and sends an electrical signal to your brain's olfactory bulb, where you begin to interpret it.
The route of smell transmission is short and fast, and it goes right to your feels.
Smell is the only sense that does not pass through the thalamus, but instead goes directly to the limbic system, particularly the amygdala (associated with emotion) and hippocampus (involved in memory).
This is the same circuitry that processes fear, pleasure, love, grief, and your deep emotional patterns.
Scent as Survival
Years ago, broke and unraveling, I’d go stand in the co-op’s essential oil aisle.
I couldn’t afford therapy, but I could uncork the little bottles and inhale.
Rose Absolute made my chest warm.
White Pine cleared my mind.
I’d leave feeling more alive.
Not fixed, but less fractured.
Some scents were wrong for me.
Clove and manuka were too thick and sharp.
Later, I found I had a skin sensitivity to both.
My body said no before my mind knew why.
This is scent’s gift: a language older than words, spoken from skin to spirit.
The Landscape of Emotion
The smell of hot slate after summer rain still calms me—earthy, metallic, faintly sweet.
It smells like freedom. Like being ten and barefoot and unafraid.
The smell of my baby’s head.
My high school boyfriend's t-shirt.
Of an old book or new soil.
These scents don’t just remind us who we are, they re-member us, stitching together scattered parts.
The Perfume Studio
Now I help people translate scent into story.
In my studio, I hand clients scent strips and watch their bodies respond.
When someone finds a note they love, their whole system shifts.
Shoulders drop, eyes close, a smile flickers.
Their mind quiets. Their animal body awakes.
I had one client who seemed all business: spreadsheets, strategy, heels on hardwood.
But when she smelled cardamom, her breath caught.
“This reminds me of something I can’t name,” she said.
We built her perfume around it, spicy, warm, mysterious. A scent for her power, yes.
But also her pleasure.
Another client smelled basil and started crying.
“My Nonna’s kitchen,” she whispered. “She’s gone now. I miss her every day.”
We added basil to her blend, a ribbon of memory running through the heart of the fragrance, both ache and joy.
Scent is not frivolous.
It is not superficial.
Scent is how we find our way back.
To ourselves.
To each other.
To what we love and what we've lost.
Whether as baby bats in a dark cave, broke-ass seekers in a food co-op aisle, or clients in a perfume studio, scent bypasses logic and speaks directly to our emotional body.
It is both instinct and invitation to come home, to remember, to feel.
Next Week at Camp LightHeart:
Smell This Poem
We’ll be using scent to write, remember, play, and pray.
We’ll explore the poetics of the nose: how aroma shapes emotion, how scent can ground, arouse, transport, and transform.
If you’re longing to feel more you, come.
If you want to follow your nose into memory, magick, or just a little joy, come.
No scent or writing background needed.
Just your breath, your nose, your willingness.
This is a by-donation, no-barrier-to-access offering.
Part of my ongoing anti-capitalist experiment in community, celebration, and poetic living.
Update from the field:
The first week of Camp LIghtHeart ‘How to be like Water’ was a wet, wondrous success.
Needs were met: mine and the campers’.
Hearts were lightened. Joy was shared.
We made beauty together.
Let’s keep going.
So come.
Come smell this poem with me.
Let’s remember who we are through scent, story, and the sacred.
Logistics:
Week of June 2
Online
Monday 7 pm Eastern, Saturday 12 PM Eastern
Sessions will be recorded.
By donation
Ready to join?
1. Fill out the registration form
2. Submit donation via Venmo: @pavini-moray
P.S. A scent meditation is coming to entice your senses further and welcome you to camp. Watch your inbox this weekend!
You were and are a wonderful teacher