Lessons & Reflections from the National Butterfly Center

The sweetness is starting to return to my life, and boy, is it delicious! Over the past six months it’s been difficult to appreciate much of the good stuff that’s crossed my path, but the intoxicating fragrance of the Texas Ebony in bloom has awakened me to the richness of life, once again.

Last year was a real doozy and the lessons I learned were bitter, at best. I came to understand how grief can blind a person to beauty and leave one attuned to pain and sadness. This awful state makes it nearly impossible to experience pleasure or indulge in delightful pastimes, as the world becomes dull and the body longs for numbness.

What a kick in the pants it was when the sharp, tingly aroma of citrus, unexpectedly resurrected me! It jolted my senses with sensational overtures, playful and enticing as a burlesque dancer, and my nose ushered in excitement for the first time in a long time.

Turns out, our very survival rests, in an evolutionary way, on our sense of smell. It is the oldest, most primitive sense belonging to even the most simple, single-celled organisms, because chemo-detection of elements in our environment is fundamental to our health and safety. It may be our most powerful sense, too, as researchers from Rockefeller University recently determined humans can detect about one TRILLION distinct scents. Finally, we now know our olfactory sense is the only cranial nerve (among those that control bodily functions, such as hearing, taste and vision) that can regenerate.

Survival. Regeneration. Resurrection. Suck it all in!

I smell a lot of funky and fantastic things at the National Butterfly Center; it’s the nature of working closely with Nature, but I had not experienced this aspect of her majesty, yet...how she reveals herself to patient and attentive suitors when she comes into blossom, sharing her very essence, timeless and too perfect.

Diane Ackerman, in A Natural History of the Senses, writes: "A flower's fragrance declares to all the world that it is fertile, available, and desirable…. Its smell reminds us in vestigial ways of fertility, vigor, life-force, all the optimism, expectancy, and passionate bloom of youth. We inhale its ardent aroma and, no matter what our ages, we feel young and nubile in a world aflame with desire."

How silly of me to forget what a magical thing intimacy is. Standing in the shade of the ebony, her routine act—the release of this “ardent aroma”—overtook me, igniting a hunger for all the delicate and heavy, savory, exciting and stupendous things of this world.

AAAaaahhhhhh! It’s good to be back.

Photo Copyright Mike Rickard