Enlightenment Through the Nose

Or how to know when it is autumn

Forget what the free bank calendar on your kitchen wall says. Forget what the science nerds say about planetary wobble and hemispheric light balance. Forget what the internet pundits say about pumpkins and colorful leaves. There is one time-tested, sure-fire way to know when autumn has arrived.

It is when you smell the glorious, euphoric smell of roasting green chile!

Before I go any further I must explain that the word, chili (with an i at the end) refers to a tomato-based meat stew often eaten with crackers. It is what you put on a hot dog to turn it into a chili dog. The word chile (with an e at the end) refers to a vegetable in the pepper family. Jalapeno peppers, serrano peppers, habanero peppers, bell peppers, poblano peppers; these are all vegetables and they are chile peppers (with an e at the end). 92.374% of Americans don’t know this fact — including the young nerds who put together Medium’s text editor’s spell check. You can pile chile peppers on a hot dog all day long and it won’t turn it into a chili dog! If you don’t believe me go visit the New Mexico Green Chile Institute. They wouldn’t misspell their own name.

And the greatest, most flavorful, most euphoric chile pepper in the entire world is the New Mexico Green Chile. It may very well be the most delicious vegetable — or food in general — on this planet. I would like to thank God for this very sacred food but He/She/It had nothing to do with it. This type of chile pepper was cultivated by humans! (Through old-fashioned hybridization, NOT genetic engineering.) It was created by the ag department at the University of New Mexico.

It was originally called the New Mexico Big Jim Green Chile Pepper. That’s quite a delicious mouthful. Most people in the know now refer to it simply as green chile or Big Jims or Hatch green chile. (Big Jim was the head of the ag department.) Hatch is considered the green chile capital of the entire world.

Anyway, I was thinking about green chile on my early morning walk. This shows how unenlightened I am. If I was truly enlightened I would not have been thinking about anything as I walked. I would instead be fully present, thought-free, as I communed with nature and enjoyed my walk, right?

The reason thoughts of green chile were rolling around in my noggin like a couple of marbles in an empty tin can is because yesterday I had a supreme spiritual experience involving green chile.

Green chile is not grown nor known up here in the bland meat and potatoes Great Plains. But I’m not the only green chile aficionado around here. There is a man who owns one of those cylindrical metal chile roasting machines. Every September he drives down to New Mexico and fills his van with bushels and bushels of green chile peppers. Then for two weekends in September he sets up his machine next to the highway and roasts and sells green chile. Since Wal-Mart — the only grocery store in town — does not carry green chile I am eternally grateful for this man. I am perhaps his most ardent and loyal customer.

You won’t read this in Wikipedia but so many of our greatest ancient woo-woo masters have told us that enlightenment can be attained through our olfactory senses. I wholeheartedly agree. While green chile has the greatest flavor of any food on the planet, roasting green chile emits the most joyous, orgasmic smell on the planet. It smells so good that one can be thrown into rapture.

So my green chile friend was roasting yesterday and, like clockwork, I showed up. He asked me how many pounds I wanted but I waved him off, saying, “First I need the smell.”

Back when I lived in New Mexico and smelled the transcendental aroma of green chile roasting not only did I immediately get hungry but I also instantly knew that autumn was afoot. Nothing smells more like autumn to me than roasting green chile.

So yesterday I stood in front of the roaster for half an hour. Yes, I was blasted by the heat of the roaster but I was also blasted by the smell of the green chile. I breathed deeply, pushing the smell throughout my body, all the way out to my fingertips and down to the bottom of my feet. I wanted to fill my body with as much of the smell as I could.

As I did this my inner calendar turned a page. For me, autumn officially began.

I kept inhaling the smell as long as I could. I felt myself being overwhelmed by feelings of peace and tranquility and balance and joy and love. (It’s way better than meditation.) I then purchased five pounds of roasted green chile — sadly all I can afford right now — and took it home to wash and clean and bag up.

It wasn’t enough to fill my freezer of course but my friend will be roasting next weekend one more time. Hopefully I can find a hundred dollar bill on the street so that I can go back and truly stock up. After all, what I get will have to last me until next September.

While I was at home standing over the kitchen sink washing away the green chile skins and stems and seeds (back-breaking work) my mind went off into a tangent. I wondered what it would be like if we could somehow infuse the entire atmosphere of the planet with the smell of roasting green chile. We’d be able to smell it every single day. Humans would be overcome with joy and peace would break out. Humankind would collectively become enlightened and begin experiencing what the ancient woo-woo masters referred to as ‘heaven on earth.’ Wouldn’t that be awesome?

But would it? Sure that might help humankind become enlightened and move into a higher octave of vibratory frequency but would the smell be as exciting if we smelled it every single day? Would it become just like the air we breathe; something we take for granted? And how on earth would we know when summer turns to autumn?

Happy Autumn Everyone!

Copyright by White Feather. All Rights Reserved.

Speaking of food…