Come To My Senses A Year of Living Sensually
Little Tinkles
Just a brief eardrum-tickler that pleased me. My mother’s significant other – Ross – had a friend whose last name was Loblaw. It’s a fairly common surname in Canada. His first name was Robert – which is more ubiquitous. Robert, of course, is shortened to “Bob.” In a little tinkle of the senses, Ross’s friend was [...]
Karate of the Five Senses
When I started my quest to educate and heighten my senses, I had set an alarm to ring regularly and remind me to focus on hearing, touching, tasting, seeing and smelling. I would stop everything and just absorb every hour or two the whine of the buzz-saw or the hypnotic tinkle of wind chimes, the [...]
Death by Umami
In my quest to educate my senses, I bombed them into surrender with umami yesterday. It started with an umami explosion first thing in the morning and continued with umami bomblets. An umami hand grenade jarred me at lunchtime and an umami clusterbomb smacked me left and right throughout the afternoon until a bubbling umami [...]
The Taste of Soap
In one of the notes I wrote in my daily journal while I was in exile at my mom’s place in Canada, I fretted about how I would continue to enjoy my senses with the same intensity after leaving. “Right now, mom’s sprinklers just turned on, misting the air, and the smell of low tide is [...]
Revelation
I arrived in London much as I did the last time – little money, exhausted, and still toting in one hand the outsized Where’s Wally posters for my daughter that had now been halfway around the world twice. I went to the same hotel I had stayed at to recover from my sliced tongue [...]
Lessons
I knew I had a lesson to learn from my deportation and I knew it must be a big one. Being evicted from Romania compelled me to spend quality time with my family back in Canada for the first time in 20 years. Over the coming weeks in Canada, the unlikely, seemingly impossible, family [...]
The Little Thing
An aside from my story. One major lesson for me in Nanaimo came from a happiness guru whose head didn’t much surpass my knee. His name is Callum Brown. I had never met him before a police order forced me back to Canada. He is my nephew. I have never seen a happier child – ever. I [...]
That Darned Serenity!
My reacquaintance with my basic senses continued. After almost two decades of traveling the globe as a foreign correspondent, a serious episode of travel shock was still to come. It wasn’t in Afghanistan, where I regularly ate off the floor and went weeks at a time without actually seeing a woman’s face. It wasn’t in [...]
Low Tide
The taste in my mouth as I awoke in London the next day was a gourmand’s nightmare. In the foggy first few seconds of consciousness, I was left wondering where the heck my mouth had been. Oh yeah! The stitches tugging precariously at the heart of my tongue reminded me. My mouth had been dried [...]
Mayday! Mayday!
I started to become more aware of my senses on May 21, 2010 when I saw the border guard of my nightmares at the airport in Bucharest, Romania. It set off a chain of events that ended with me here and now, working on the project detailed in the About section. I had just flown in [...]