associations

"Once every few years, even now, I catch the scent of Africa. It makes me want to keen, sing, clap up thunder, lie down at the foot of a tree and let the worms take whatever of me they can still use. I find it impossible to bear. Ripe fruits, acrid sweat, urine, flowers, dark spices, and other things I've never even seen-- I can't say what goes into the the composition, or why it rises up to confront me as I round some corner hastily, unsuspecting. It has found me here..."
-- Orleanna Price,
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Isn't it funny how we can smell or hear or taste something that transports us to another experience? How is it that something so mundane and universal can become so meaningful and particular in an instant, merely because of an association that exists only in one mind?

Usually I don't know it's coming. I'll be in the middle of an ordinary moment, when all the sudden, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. I'm caught off guard, because, why should I have such unexplainable happiness when I see the cover of a children's book? And how is it that a song can be so undeniably inseparable from one person?

It is often much more subtle though, and I don't know quite what to make of this. How can a building that I'm seeing for the first time evoke such overwhelming memories? What can I make of these visceral responses?

Perhaps things are more connected than we realize...