Explore your senses:

• Author : the Ginger Pussycat

My instructions were to focus on one sense while walking to the shops and describe it on returning. My first instinct was to choose touch but grabbing my partner's bottom was not appreciated. So I tried licking a building window and decided taste was definately out. And then we arrived at the organic food store and I was overwhelmed.

Small ripe avocados, dark and rough, yet inside a pale green, smooth and luscious. Pontiac potatoes, covered in red earth, powdery white yellow inside. Sugar snap peas, eaten whole, crunchy, marked with imperfections, the taste crisp, green, refreshing. Ginger, juicy, nobbled, growing in mishapen clumps, inside is almost green, piquant, invigorating.

This shop had everything, colour, texture, touch and taste. All in a cardboard box, paper bags and string. Doing my bit for the environment and enjoying its textures at the same time.
 

• Author : Riverwind

My back hurts. Not like a pain or a twinge, just sort of a knowing that it is uncomfortable. In two places, my lower back, you know, near your hips? That area is stiff.

My shoulders are more noticeable, they are all bunched up; I can feel the muscles pushing on my throat uncomfortably. The back of my chest feels like there is a pressure pushing against it, I don't know what that's about.
So I do what I always do when I feel this way - I should say, what I've done for the past 12 years. My eyes close, I inhale deeply, letting my shoulders rise up towards my ears, breath, breath, breath, all in, filling myself to where is hurts the other way.
Then HAAAAaaaah, let it all out. drop the shoulders down and back, let that tension go, really check it, and chase it out of the muscles with sticks.

But I'm at work, so I can't really do that. Weird looks if I go HAAAAaaaah! in the middle of the office.
So an abridged version, then. I drop my shoulders as I slowly exhale that last breath, and feel fingertips of lost girlfriends tracing circles on my skin. The tingle of their missing touch pulling stone from stress.
Three more times, each exhale bringing more tingle, more feeling of a phantom backrub.
An expansion of my chest on the breath in, in all directions, filling my back and sides as well as my chest, a tensing in my stomach to push the air where I need it.

Feel that last breath hummmmmmm itself up and out of my nose, feel it deep in my lungs. Pull the stomach up, pull the chest in, the fire bruning away the last of the unused energy tightening me up.

And afterwards, I feel the same. Still tense, still a knowledge of pain in my lower back and neck. But it's a little quieter now. I can feel my injured knee reminding me to see the doctor, my broken throat warning me that again, tonight, I won't be able to swallow my dinner like a normal animal. Like a normal person.Even a chill on my forehead, that feeling you get just before you are caught cheating, caught with your hand in the cookie jar. That rush of fear and wrongness; and I have it sitting at my desk. Sitting in front of a computer making money creating nothing useful but by those who also sit and make money all day.

The sun's going down. I think I'll leave a little early today, get home before everything really ices over, so I can take care of the dog and eat dinner before it's time to head over to the Karate Dojo.
Some physical exercise to break the mode, destroy the day in a hundred pushups and a hundred curls. Kicks, punches, chops, rolls.
Close my eyes and go HAAAAaaaah without anyone looking at me funny.