Walk 6 - Earth Fan

Earth Fan 

A Time Travel Experience through Scent

The Earth Fan staves (bamboo sticks) were soaked in a simple steam reduction of leaf tea. I am hopeful the fan staves will retain the scent and when the fan is used the scent will be released and amplified.

This is the scent of Earth herself. Tanny, robust hummus tea and a deep, warm brothy mix of mushrooms and leaf yeast. Leaves naturally fall to the ground, to the Earth, and begin the process of decomposition into leaf matter and eventually, with time and all the alchemical processes of nature, become nourishing soil that sustain beautiful natural spaces to enjoy and to contemplate all that Mother Earth gifts us.

Studies show that babies recognize the distinct scent of their mothers’ breast, this being their primary source of nourishment and feelings of security and well-being. Mother Earth is our common Ancestral Mother. 

When you use the Earth Fan, fan your face and inhale deeply several times to re-connect your lungs and body with our common Ancestral Mother. Do this several times bringing the scent deep into your lungs. What do you experience? Are there any past memories that come up in association with your experience?

You may experience Time Travel to the past, for example; playing in a pile of fallen leaves, laughing, throwing them in the air and seeing them get picked up by a soft breeze or a gust of wind, or crunching through the woods, kicking up leaves that have piled up on the forest floor on a warm October day. Spend a moment Time Traveling to the past.

Breath normally now and close your eyes as you bring the fan closer and ‘look’ through the eye holes keeping your eyes closed. View a desired future state of our Mother Earth. Spend a moment Time Traveling to the future. Fill out all the details of your desired future for Mother Earth in your minds’ eye. You have made a ‘future memory.’  

The act of creating a ‘future memory’ is called foresight; the ability to predict, or the action of predicting what will happen or what is needed in the future. There are fundamental differences between mentally traveling through time into the future (foresight) versus mentally traveling through time to the past.  What do you think is required to develop foresight? 

Background info: 

I took my scent walk on Monday and paid attention to changing scents in different places on my hike. As an aside, I became interested in leaves that had fallen to the ground on my path that had interesting hole patterns made by some boring beetle, I assumed. I brought them back with me and not knowing exactly what I would do and put them in two trays of water to soften. I planned to press them between blotters. I read a few articles on the computer using search words such as scent and memory, olfactory memory and then went down a rabbit hole to olfactory time travel, future orientation and foresight. I began to ask, Could using scent, collected from natural places like deserts, mountains, fields, forests, lakes, waterways and shorelines, be used as a prompt to help us imagine a future in which we take action to solve behaviors related to climate change? That lead me to think about many things and to search for something, even if I was offered more questions, that might help answer the question. We know scent can bring past memories back to us in a nano-second, but can scent be used to establish 'future memory' and would the 'future memory' and scent would be linked?

Process photos:

Conclusion:

The scent experiment didn't produce as strong a scent as I would have liked but when I held the Earth Fan right up to my face to 'look' through the 'future memory' eye holes, I could definitely smell it. Nose has to be literally right on the staves. And I was happy with that because embedding a future memory with scent is, I think, the most important piece of the concept. The prototype for this piece came out pretty well. The leaves with holes bored in them have a lacy appearance that worked nicely with the fan design and the idea of a hand fan gently moving air into the face works well to move scent where it is best experienced and observed.