Although this site was originally dedicated to wine stuff, it gradually leaned into a broader direction. Over the years wine had the ability to bridge the distance between people, teach history, culture, food, music, science, some sense of personal expression, sensory perception and other things…but it was just one of many lenses to learn about the world. Finding a way to integrate different kinds of information is the key to understanding, especially when there’s a mental + physical aspect. Take this ancient Greek idea:

Aisthanomai (‘ahee-sthan’-om-ahee’) : to know by feeling while doing 

From aiō, “to perceive/understand by the bodily senses”

Aisthanomai defines our physical senses as the key to perceiving and understanding the world around us. Where feeling is the link between perception and memory, it is also at the core of knowledge. This was the foundation for the study of Aesthetics, a theoretical discipline based on sensory cognition. But where modern Aesthetics relies heavily on obnoxious academic work that debates values in aesthetic appreciation, such as the question “what is art”, Aisthanomai refers to the creative impulse that can be found anywhere, at any moment in our daily life.

If to perceive is to have kinetic empathy, our appreciation of life is learned though our experiences. In the purest sense, it is a series of moments: the stimulus, the thought, the action, and its reception. Creativity and imagination are efforts to connect ourselves to this process. Whether we appreciate, condemn, bestow, honour or ignore these moments, they’re a constant. It’s up to us what we make of them.