Carpe Doodle Doo!!

Having now been in San Jose, Costa Rica for a week, I am reminded that roosters crow bright and early every morning, announcing, as we have always been led to believe, the break of dawn. What I have never noticed about their crowing patterns until now is that they also crow all..day..long. Presumably, it is their job, having been gloriously and purposely designed by the Maker in just this manner.

We too, had a purposeful design at one time. It has been altered by the bright lights and noise patterns of city living that engulf most of us. Our natural circadian rhythms - those cyclical changes that occur over 24 hour periods - have been nearly obliterated by blackout shades, overwork, sleeping pills, and noise and light pollution. As a result, we are missing some important aspects of life: the ability to control our own body clocks (or more accurately to allow them to have control over us), to to manage our lives less stressfully, and to see the beauty of the sunrise.

Sometimes I wish my body worked differently than it does. I am too attuned to my circadian clock, to smell, to touch, to temperature. I begin to awaken each morning when light and temperature shift, around 3:30 a.m. - this is gradual lightening of sleep that would be lovely were I a farmer. But alas, I don't have my forty acres and were they to be mine, I am ill-equipped to be the mule. By the time the sun is up (and this changes seasonally, a joint function of light and temperature), I am wide awake. It is an annoyingly useful tool. And it is how we were made. A millenia ago. I am a throwback of a modern woman.

I have not lost my animal sense of smell, either. Which means that I can smell animals. And dirty socks. And you. And other things. I don't mind not needing an alarm clock (I know that's not a smell - its a reminder of another sense that my cavewoman self has clung to). Or knowing that a deer is nearby. But some of the funk that presents itself can be, well, alarming, off-putting, stomach-turning. And no one else smells it, typically, or as early as I do.

One of my mother's favorite stories about my nose is that we were walking one day on Chicago's long Miracle Mile and I was looking around for something. "What is it?," she asked. "A horse," I replied. She said that there were no horses in sight, as we could see for blocks and blocks, extremely long blocks. We walked six of them and around the corner of the sixth was a horse. My mother has learned that my nose knows. As well she should have known. I inherited my nose from my maternal grandfather who, with an eighth grade education was a foundry metalurgist. He smelled metals to discern their components for munitions and battleship components in WWII, then later trained Ph.D. students in this skill. Most of us don't need such finely tuned noses so have lost their capacity to do more than is absolutely necessary for our protection from harmful substances and to indulge us in the beauty that wafts into our lives through flowers, delicious meals, and the powdered scents of newborns. Trackers, many indigenous peoples, perfumers, have been blessed (or cursed with) with their original sensory capacities for much more. And other folks like me, who do not use our noses in our livelihoods, simply smell more of the world than we know what to do with. But are grateful, mostly, even when it stinks. The other side is glorious.

Its a glorious reminder to get ourselves back. To awaken with the sun. To fall asleep naturally. To remember all of our five senses - sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste - lingering on each of them just long enough to push past our normal hurry. Life is short. Showers provide an opportunity to feel individual drops of water, in addition to getting clean. Passionfruit pie should be slowly savoured. Food is for more than nourishment; it is to give the palate joy, it is to provide an environment where relationships can be shared. Homes can filled with flowers, the scents of which we can learn to distinguish. We each give off our own distinct aromas - if we get good we can smell each other's arrivals. (But as I have already warned, be sure to wear clean socks so as to protect the other).

So the rooster has just crowed again, an hour past dawn. It turns out that their crowing is territorial (these strutting men with their finely turned coxcombs want to control their women in what is apparently a cross-species trait) and social (they crow because they hear other cocks crowing). I think their lack of chivalry aside, the Lesson of the Rooster to us humans may be this: roosters crow to remind us of who we used to be, and who we might be again.