One or two days a week, I awake at sunrise, put on my comfortable clothes and sneakers, then walk from my home on the top of Capitol Hill through the University of Washington campus.  Some days I choose to go via the Montlake Bridge and back across University Bridge.  Other days I take the reverse route.  The distance is five to six miles until I am back home for coffee and breakfast.  I do not count off the distance so much by steps or mileage but what I encounter along the way – primarily bunnies.  Today was a three-bunny walk, for three little brown bunnies hopped across the sidewalk before me.  They freeze for a few moments, so I can say good morning, but not long enough to shake hands – or paws.  Off they hop into a bush or across someone’s lawn.  Once I had a six-bunny walk, but not so often now that coyotes have captured Capitol Hill.

Although the route is familiar, I never know what will capture my senses.  Will I inhale the fragrance of recent rain on dry pavement?  Will I notice black-eyed susans in bloom along a garden wall?  Often my thoughts are overwhelmed with the roar of morning commuter traffic on the I-5 bridge alongside of Harvard Avenue East.  The air thickens below the bridge, and I taste dust mixing with my own salty sweat from climbing the steep hill.  If I am fortunate, another early morning walker approaches coming down the hill. Today it is a young man with a leashed, fluffy white Samoyed.  I stop to admire his dog, asking permission to pet it.  “Certainly,” the young man says. “He loves to be petted.”  The thick cushion of fur feels soft and luxuriant.  

 I am conscious of using all five senses on my morning walk today.  Clearly, I am a creature of habit if I take the same routes and measure them in bunny sightings. And habit can make us immune to the many gifts of those five senses.  We lean heavily on sight. A Harvard art history professor assigns a ten-minute uninterrupted focus on one painting.  Try this sustained visual focus. Your sight expands, deepens.  If we walk while listening to podcasts or music, we are consumed with sound.  Have you ever wondered why we are gifted with five senses through which to luxuriate in God’s world?  On creation did the Holy Spirit think, “This is one beautiful garden.  How can my people show gratitude for their home if they experience it through only one venue?  I will give them five.”   Some creatures enjoy more refined senses than any one of our five.  A snake’s belly adjusts to the heat or coolness of the ground.  My cat discerns movement in the dark, vision that escapes me.

I am currently reading Life in Five Senses by Gretchen Rubin.  Because it is an audio book that accompanies my walk, I feel as if I have a coach telling me to “Notice this,” or “Don’t miss that.”  She writes that one person’s sensory world is not the same as another person’s sensory world.  Any two of us smelling a lily will not smell the identical perfume.  And what do we make of our sensory input?  So much depends on associative memory.  Walking across Red Square on the UW campus this still August morning, I look to the blue sky in an opening between Kane Hall and the Odegaard library. Above the steps dividing the buildings, a red, white and blue American flag dances in the morning breeze.  The sight might have elicited pride and patriotisms.  Instead, I revisit grief and the end of innocence.  Long before red square was built, there was a grassy knoll there offering a horizon view from the flag, beyond Drumheller Fountain, to Mt. Rainier.  On November 22^nd, 1963, my young, sophomore self walked from Smith Hall to Parrington Hall. passing by the lowering flag that told me the president whom I just learned had been shot, was now deceased. 

It is an awesome experience to walk, not necessarily to get from one place to another but simply to feel your body’s muscles, heart pumping, breath inhaling, senses tuned in a landscape of birdsong and people chatter, sun’s warmth and rain’s cleansing.  This too is a spiritual practice in the very realization that Earth is God’s Garden into which we are all invited for the short time called Our Life. Yesterday I listened to Debra Jarvis’s recent podcast on The Final Say in which her subject, aware if of impending death, celebrates all her five senses she enjoyed while alive.  All mortals, we cannot know if we will “take it with us.”  I want to go with a memory of the number of bountiful bunnies on my journey.