Today, while I was walking home from the Bodegona, I noticed that I was smelling things very subtly.
Or, rather, much more subtly than I have for years.
I quit smoking almost three years ago in Medjugorje. The first week of September, 2009.
People can say what they want about the apparitions there. I know a lot of people have judged them to be false. Maybe so. All I can say is that of all the major Marian shrines I have made pilgrimage to (including Lourdes, Fatima and Guadalupe) Medjugorge is my favorite. It is beautiful there, a little village with a humble church nestled between two Bosnian hills... The place, like all great shrines, is overrun with pilgrims, and the lines for confession there are the longest I have ever seen. Dozens of priests in dozens of languages, lines of hundreds of penitents at every hour of the day.
If the apparitions are false, then that is odd fruit.
I know nothing about the apparitions or the seers. I can only say Medjugorje is amazing, a powerful place. One that I had a strong sense of forboding at, a sense of premonition like I have only felt a few times before. A sense that has always been followed by some consumation. I was very impressed, and was changed somehow.
I smoked my last cigarette there, the morning I hailed a cab away to Dubrovnik. I have not smoked since.
It's funny how I used to love to smoke - I never was a regular smoker, often going weeks without smoking at all. I never felt it as an addiction. I did it with friends, and almost always with good tobacco. As a social act, smoking is sublime. Drinks and a couple bowls in the pipe.. When it is a deliberate, conscious act, and you are paying attention, smoking can be one of the finest pleasures on earth. I often felt the hobbit, you see. It was good..
But not good enough.
The problem is that we all too often do it - like we too often live, eat and work - mindlessly, mechanically. So when I began to start to smoke more often, sometimes a half pack a day for strings of days - and when I began to roll cigarettes with the Frenchmen in Bourguillon, and began to become a full blown smoker, well..
I knew I had to stop, for good.
For while one in ten smokes is sublime, the negative consequences to the body are vast. One of the worst is that you lose most of your sense of smell. And when you quit, it doesn't immediately return. Your body takes years to recover from the abuse..
Years. As I say, it's been almost three now. This past year ambient tobacco smoke has begun to really annoy me. I am thankfully now a re-confirmed as a non-smoker. And now abruptly, just today, I seem to have suddenly recouped some of my long lost sensitivity. Maybe not all what once had as a child, but a stiff modicum of it. I suddenly noticed I was smelling things like I haven't in years.
It was mildly religious, in that I became plutot vif, quickened, slightly ecstatic. The world again leapt with forgotten vibrancy and texture.
Every thing vibrates with sense and poignancy. We are as open nerves receiving the vibration of creation's song; the light, the sound, the scent, the taste..
Taste and see..
How things are good: Gratias Tibi Beata Mater Maria,Virgo et Regina.
Anyhow, I have been in a mild funk these past two weeks, and have left this here blog aside. This week is my last in Guate. A frame shift is coming, and as it happens I think the blog here shall become rather more fecund. I think that I've shed the extraneous attention that I once may have had, and that anyone still following this has merited the grace of my pearls.. Such as they may be..
So they shall be strewn for your collective delectation, my dear public. I begin to write.
Tonight I write merely to tell you that I can smell. Deo gratias. Ay, Just thought you'd like to know.
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