Organizing the Bench, Phase 1

This is a process that I go through far too often with this natural perfumery gig. It gets old as I get old and becomes more difficult to slog through each time I have to do it. I've noticed that I have developed a bit of OCD of late -- again, I think it's an age thing. I'm tired, and I don't want to have to clean a big mess at one time; rather, I am prone to tidy up as I go, something my mother all but pounded into my head as a child. I get it now. Especially with a blended household where I am (still) cleaning up after my children who aren't actually children anymore but grown adults who exasperate me with discarded take-out boxes that don't quite make it into the bin, dirty socks, and spills, crumbs, and what all lying around, as I am sure I exasperated my poor mother. What comes around goes around, as the saying goes. 

I have never been a neat person, my former self thriving in chaos. I've changed in this past year, this year of lockdowns and disease, imposed fear, and introspection. I no longer bloom in the environments I once did. I crave calm and peace and time to sort through things in my mind and put them into their proper order. This extends to the external environment as well. I'm slowly turning into the old lady with a house neat as a pin, though a little dust-covered, and I've developed an unhealthy obsession with teapots and embroidered cotton tea towels . . . 

It began with a clean sweep. Every single bottle of anything containing even a drop of material made its way onto a fold-out table in the living room, where they sat for three days undisturbed except for the occasional glaring side-eye (mostly from me). What really changed over this past year was my aversion to 'taking up space,' physical and emotional. I'm taking up ALL of the space these days, as is my right as the live-in maid/chef/gardener/laundress and self-employed business person and, more importantly, as a f*cking human being. Age makes one quite brave. 

After allowing the materials to rest for those few days, the process of cleaning began. Bottle after bottle, jar after jar, each one was picked up, inspected, and washed with 90% isopropyl alcohol. Once washed, the containers were put into a clean bin for later sorting and left to sit this way for another few days as the thought of diving in right away caused a wee panic attack. Big jobs like this throw my proclivity toward procrastination into overdrive. But finally, the real work began, and it's continuing today. 

I feel as if sorting the materials into their proper places frees my mind. As I handle a sparkling clean jar of jasmine sambac concrete, I begin to formulate. Jasmine sambac, green tea, Indian patchouli, a wee sheen of oakmoss, and a fat splash of clementine finished off with a dab of magnolia. Ambers always come to mind first; labdanum, benzoin, vanilla, cloves, rose, jasmine grandiflorum, dark patchouli, and a drop of neroli to kick it off, then begins the real formulation of this new luscious amber perfume. Since the very beginning, this process has been true that I am utterly inspired by the materials. What each material wants in terms of partnerships and relations. This chemical bonding is what fascinates me. 

As of right now, about 40% of the goods are sorted into their official categories; florals, mints, spices, balsams and ambers, resins, animalics, citrus, et al. Once this is done, hopefully, before Memorial Day 2021, more precise categorizations will emerge. Tinctures with tinctures, dilutions with dilutions, enfleurage extracts with enfleurage extracts, and so with pomades, home distillations, bio-regional materials, and cast-offs, throwaways, and potential synthetics getting a jail cell far away from the natural populace. 

There is always a plan, and the plan is that these newly cleaned and categorized goods will sit a while during the overall cleaning process of the studio. The pandemic activated my hoarding gene. No, I haven't piled $20,000 worth of toilet paper into the studio, and I don't have a barracks-sized stash of MRE's either. I hoarded perfumery and incense stuff. A centrifuge, a backlog of organic alcohol, a new scale, a new still, a magnetic stirrer, tons of beakers, tons of metal picking tools, wee bottles galore, and, yes, more raw materials than space to store them. As they arrived, they and the boxes they came in, would simply be stacked into the studio. Then came a day that the pathway through the studio disappeared. There was literally no way to get into the studio anymore. The drawers of the bench could only be opened an inch or two because of the boxes of goodies piled against them; there was no space to put anything anymore -- at all! I realized that this closing in, this massive tomb of disarray had the effect of stopping the perfumery and incense work dead in its tracks. I realized that I was sad a lot. Emotional. Exhausted. No longer driven to work in the craft I love so very much. Then I realized (stupid me) that I had literally locked myself out of the space where my craft is -- well, crafted! 

And, so begins the organization of the bench, phase one.