Shel Graves' Sensorium

Taste: rhubarb Sight: peach and seagreen walls; blossoming; green mountains overlooking Hood River Sound: a baby panda's cry Smell: floral hand soap Touch: a firm hug; tears Extra: redaction poems -- "People like me are in fear of being silenced in subtle and violent ways. We fear our histories will be blotted out with black marks of denial and revision. This is one way to look at the future." — The Art of Silencing , Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor  Grateful for:  travelogue movies - Norway, Turkey, China

Taste: lemon and soy Sight:  art by Forrest Olson , Moksha Marquardt and Alexandra Dvornikova Sound:  shovel scraping Smell: hay, compost, llama urine Touch:  donkey fur Extra: a bomb, singing an Eastern European folk song, a massage by a writer interrupted; a glass drinking bowl of etched crystal with three glass beads at its base; the valley of its making by Nate Marshall; "I think the most inspiring things for me are these: Forest, music, animals, wilderness, moss and lichens, mushrooms, Russian fairy tales that I’ve heard when i was a child, masks, rituals, night dreams, childhood experience, folklore, medieval art, archetypes, psychiatry, human’s brain, carnivorous plants, venomous or dangerous things, lonelyness, mori girls, vintage dresses. " -- Alexandra Dvornikova Grateful for: art and poetry; a gentle day, a gentle soul

Taste:  green tea Sight: grey mist, grey morning light, soft, gentle, calming Sound: cat lapping water; pigs munching alfalfa Smell: hibiscus soap Touch:  warm goat horns Extra:  therianthropy - the belief that one was an animal in a past life or that one has the spirit or soul of an animal Grateful for: the blossoms on Uhura, the black tulip magnolia; time to volunteer

Taste:   Mac 'n Chao Cheese ; maca, hemp hearts, cocoa powder Sight: Shaping Sound Travis Wall Sound: Ryan Lott of Son Lux  Smell:  turmeric Touch:  creamy Extra: Goddess Tanit on the paradise island Ibiza; "Spring! And Earth is like a child / who has learned many poems by heart. / For the trouble of that long learning / she wins the prize. / .... All that the teacher taught her—the many / thoughts / pressed now into roots and long / tough stems: she sings! She sings!" — Rainer Maria Rilke   "In coming to desire dead bodies for dinner, they had unwittingly become complicit in the destruction of their own bodies." — Pattrice Jones, Afterword, Liberation as Connection and the Decolonization of Desire, in Sistah Vegan  Grateful for: friends; spring; dance; volunteering; knowledge