A winter storm just finished having its way with us, after bringing days of snow and cold that left streets icy and slippery. I'm cautious about driving in such conditions, so for the most part I didn't.

But this morning, after a warm front finally swept in and left the streets newly bare of snow, I headed up to St. Edwards Park for a much-needed walk in the woods. Few other walkers were on the trail, but I had plenty of company: a wren rustling through the forest litter; chickadees calling from the Indian plum trees along the lakeshore; a Douglas squirrel leaping with impossible grace from the trunk of a fir tree to an alder branch.

This regular walking loop leads down through tall cedars and firs to the lake, then along the lakeshore and back up. The last leg of the route winds up out of the cedar/fir forest into a grove of tall alders. As I entered the grove and breathed in the sweet, earthy alder scent--especially impactful because there had been very little to smell in the chilly forest below---my heart leapt with happiness.

With that happiness came a memory from when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. As a biology student, I needed to walk or ski about a mile back and forth each day from the main campus to a smaller cluster of buildings where lab classes were typically held. During the long, dark winter months, when temperatures were far, far below freezing, we students hustled back and forth, swaddled in layers of wool and down, with only our squinted eyes and frosted eyelashes visible.

In that season of intense cold and dark, the odors of earth and vegetation were completely absent. But by early spring, after the sun had slowly inched higher into the sky, there eventually came a day when the sunlight falling on aspen trunks along the trail had strengthened enough to cause sap to liquify and flow again. On that day each year, the first smell of that sap after the odorless winter made me instantly, headily, utterly drunk with the happiness of being alive.

Some Zen teachers use the term "skinbag" to refer to our bodies, their intention being to encourage us to drop our attachment to our bodies and our other transitory worldly preoccupations. I take their point, but I also celebrate the way that our bodies' senses connect us to so much: to our emotions, each other, the knowledge of our aliveness, the natural world that surrounds and sustains us. The first aspect of Buddhism's Eightfold Path is Wise View--the understanding that we are so inextricably connected to everyone and everything else that any sense that we are separate selves is an illusion to be seen through. Surely our skinbags can help us experience the truth of the connection that lies beneath the illusion.