The scent of snow

A few days ago, I stepped out of my apartment building, and was stopped in my tracks by a flood of sensory memory. Something in the color of the light, or the scent of the air, transported me to Paris, and for a moment, an all-too-brief moment, that's where I was, in all but body. Or maybe physically, too. Maybe I flickered. Who knows? I was in Paris, it was 1965, on a wintry day, on Avenue Suffren, on the sidewalk in front of the patisserie, and I guess if I had gone there physically, I would have arrived back in the Bronx with a pastry in my hand.This happens often to me. I think it's a natural trait in artists. In my specific case, it is also partly a result of having lived in so many different locations, and partly an attribute of New York City itself. It's called "The Big Apple", but to me it is "The Great Gate". Never has any one place allowed me to slip so often through space and time to other places. From Central Park I have been flung to the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. From W. 89th St in December, to Connecticut, Easter 1959. From the road limning the bluff overlooking the Hudson to the Hollywood Hills. From W. 94th St. to Devon. Light and scent are the passkeys every time.Here's another thing that happens: I catch a trace of Calèche on the breeze, and my mother is suddenly at my side. Not Mom as she presently is - elderly, but healthy, and happily residing in Florida - but rather Mom as she was, in Brussels, in 1967, because that's when and where she wore that perfume. Then the breeze shifts, and she evaporates. But I don't go back to her, she comes forward to me.Scientist Luca Turin suggests that scent is a vibration akin to light and sound. I think all three are keys, to tesser points, or portals, or thin places - whatever the heck you want to call them - where we can slip through, if we can let ourselves be slippery.As I said in an earlier post, saints and shamans and artists are this kind of slippery, and we probably all can be if we stop being so... so... velcro-y and sticky. We don't receive much training here in the art and practice of letting go, or holding lightly, or dreaming, and we get the equivalent of doctorates in hanging on tight. That definitely makes us sticky, so sticky in this culture that the arts have become product rather than sets of travel instructions.But I believe we come into this world knowing how to slip, and to fly. We just don't remember how.