Words smell? Well not exactly. But, there is a clear similarity between odors and words. Simply put, words are to humans as odors are to dogs. And the same applies to beliefs. In the biological sense of things belief take place in our most developed organ – the brain. The olfactory sense of reality in dogs is the same, functionally speaking. Beliefs, rites, and rituals in our species serves as ‘odors’ in the larger social sense just as actual odors do in many (most or all?) social animals, e.g., rats, dogs, ants, etc. Need I say more? I think not. I’d just ‘stink’ up the place.

Well, it is about time somebody stood up and said it! And perhaps many have. Coming out of the surf today I thought back to all the years I use to ‘hate’ swimming in the ocean. “I don’t like that salt water in my eyes”, I’d say. “I don’t like the sticky salting feeling on my skin”, I’d whine. Thinking and saying that nailed down a self fulfilled prophecy. How nice it is to have gradually returned to being an animal after all those years of believing I was a human. As words and names become simply sound in this animal’s ears, they have much less chance to get in my way.

Splitting hairs and focusing on a split hair or two imparts ‘greatness’ to an ultra narrow field. This is like being a big fish in small pond. The folly here is that we infer that this ‘greatness’ exists beyond that small pond. It doesn’t. How ‘connected to the whole’ we feel is determined by our weakest link. Or perhaps our ‘strongest’, as in ‘the world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is only the ugly…’ and so on. Our strong side blinds us to our weak side, our Achilles heel.