It's Done

They've gone. Their new place is set up, they both start work tomorrow, and life goes on. I'm sitting here staring at an empty room in dire need of cleaning, and remnants of childhood tucked here and there -- a wee sock in a corner, an empty bottle of 'bubbles' in the bathroom sink, a torn 'Frozen' poster lying crumpled on the floor. I'm sure the weeks and months will continue to present these pieces of a past life. Changes like these change us. Every time it happens, it's like hitting the reset button, time to begin again, under new and different circumstances. I vacillate between weeping and jumping for joy. Weeping wins more often. I'll get over it. I have so every other time it's happened. Now that it's done, I feel the brakes on the creativity train slowing me down a bit. It's a temporary hitch as there are dozens of new things lined up -- busy work, productive work, inspired work, goal oriented work. Sadness tends to temporarily paralyze me creatively, so I seek escape in books -- which isn't an entirely terrible thing to have happen. I mean, there are worse things to lose myself in, like meth or heroine or bottles and bottles and bottles of blue gin. Tempting as those things are, I think I'll stick with the less destructive book regimen, y'know, just in case I have to drive somewhere later.

The time consuming projects are still brewing away, and beautifully so. These things are mostly hands-off and require only time to finish. Later, like June something, is when I'll be working to get things put together. Packaging happens in July -- early to mid-July. And somewhere in there are a few weeks of R&D scheduled, to make sure that what I'm creating actually does what it's supposed to. It amazes me now how things I poo-poo'd and waved away as too archaic years ago fascinate me to no end today. I blame it all on Kyphi. She is the culprit. It was that slow, ritualized process that did it, bringing to the fore the love and passion of the work. It feels better than it did when I was in the early learning/obsessive phase of perfumery. I'm still pretty obsessed, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't learning something every day, but the ardor is a bit cooler than it was in the beginning. The honeymoon is over and now the deep, respectful love has set in. The enduring stuff.

I got a bunch of raw (and I do mean raw) materials from Dan of Apothecary's Garden. I loved some of the samples so much, I immediately ordered other things, and I've got my eye on a few other items I want, but I'm saving those purchases for later. I got some boswellia thurifera, a frankincense resin, that I'm sure I've never experienced before. It's lovely, and smells like no other frankincense I've smelled before. It's powdery and nearly floral and presents as a whole, complete, compounded incense -- crazy. I can't wait to put it into something. There is also a small sampling of onycha (shells) from the Red Sea. My nose is bruised from all the oak pollen in the air, so I can't get a real hold on what this stuff smells of, so I will have to wait for further evaluation. As it is, it smells of nothing, but it's kind of an interesting looking . . . thing. It is to be used in incense, but since I can't smell it, I can't be certain where it would go in an incense, or why (referencing the lack of scent). There were a lot of other things I got from Dan, strange things, things I've never heard of before, like raunchy tobacco from Ethiopia, which, honestly, I think is probably something like camel or elephant dung because, well, that's what it smells like. Zoo animal poop. A few years back, I was meeting with a very famous aromatherapist/perfumer who had ordered ambergris from someone in one of the many Yahoo perfume groups, and when she got the 'ambergris', she knew something was fishy (or not so fishy) and had the sample tested -- turned out the ambergris was camel poop and grease. Crazy, huh? For all those perfumers who bought that ambergris, tinctured it, and then used it in their perfumes -- yeah.  L'eau de Chameau Porc et Faux Ambergris.

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