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Month ago, I promised to write a column on the essense of essential oils before
new years eve.
So now is the time, although the emotions out of which the text was thought to blossom are gone.
But only gone in the meaning of not present at the moment.
Luckily (for now) we can remember emotions, or imagine them to be at work.
We do our best.
There we go, in one go:
The context of this is me, of course.
Plus what surrounds me.
The ongoing world is what surrounds me, a chemicals loaden envirement,
where bathrooms smell of apricots and shopping malls of carefully composed odours.
And those surroundings crowded with more and more smelling people, as if in
unspoken but fierce competition to stand out in Odour Space.
A specific part of what surrounds me can be summarized as the New Age.
And given that this body/mind system is hyper sensitve if not plain allergic
to odours of all kinds, it seems fair to say that, like the Middle Ages, the New Age is a Smelly Era.
How come? Didn’t we leave behind the frankincense of the churches, the waving smoking thuribles?
Yes, more or less, and it is rapidly replaced by the Asian variant of it, the incense stick.
And, in general, the cleaner we have become the more agressive the ads for more agressive odours
like after shaves, deodorants, chemicals loaden perfumes and a kind of war on terror when it comes
to fighting the imagined contaminations living in flush toilets with strong and strong smelling chemicals.
The New Age variant of this, quasi healthy and implicitly meant to testify of being spiritually Angehaucht,
is the use of pure essential oils.
They smell kind of a million times to strong for me, but for more and more people the use of them
seems to communicate that they have seen the Light, or are at least longing to see the Light.
Twice a year I go for a 2 week silent retreat.
And then suddenly, shockingly, surrounded by some hundred and twenty folks.
All having their own favourite smells and wearing them from very subtle to
uncredibly abuindant.
My system goes into a kind of hyper active slightly allergic fire alarm state
in that surrounding.
So, twice per year I fight for my fresh air by asking all the participants to use
as less of all those products as they dare.
Dare? Yes, dare. People hide all kinds of stuff under their odours.
My request brings up deep emotions in people, time and again.
There was this young lady that at a point I dared ask to also use less of her
for me very strong perfume. I told her that she was putting it on twice a day.
She was totally amazed: she was, especially for me, almost wearing nothing of it,
compared to her usual habit, and she only put up a tiny little bit after lunch these days.
Meaning that in the mornings I was constantly smelling what was left from right after
lunch the day before and noticing the sharp increase after lunch.
Se promised to use even less from that moment.
Days later we spoke again. (People come to me to let me smell them and ask if it is okay like that)
She told me that now she had to shower twice a day, out of fear to stink.
Totally irrational, I can assure you, this lady is smelling clean and fresh by herself,
but she is excessively afraid for smelling natural.
Just one example of many. Hers was by the way a top French perfume brand.
Then last time, there was this alsogivinghimselfsatsangwiththisformeblasphemicbuddhaname,
a man that from my perspective, my wiring, is behaving and acting in a way that is called in
my dictionary self-satisfied and in his one probably exquisitely elegant or something like that.
When he would enter the room I sometimes already smelled him coming.
Soon I would walk over to the other side of the place and stand in front of one of the open doors.
also I started telling him that his cloud of odour for me was really bothering and really overdone
in any way that I could think of it. As we are both males with a strong sense of presence,
(mine a bit hidden in shabbyness, but nevertheless the same energywise), his first reaction
was one of waving my words away. This teasing game went on for a few days.
And slowly slowly things moved a bit, he using less of the essential oil that he sprinkled
in abundance on himself.
At the end of the last retreat we had a last talk, where I shared that he was one of the
people that used the fact that essential oils are pure nature as an argument for my
arguments to be of no importance. While I think that once people start using those in pure
form, they get used to the strenght of them as normal. And they get insensitive about
others in a very subtle way: they never ever can smell others. They only smell their
favourite smell, wherever they go. A subtle form of arrogance only for those that are
not oversensitive to them. For me it is gaseous trigger to a state of alarm.
It communicates almost literally: when I walk in, you walk out.
Essenstial oils in their pure form used as body odour communicates for my system
a totall lack of …… yopu name it.
Enfin, I promised the guy to write a column on the essence of essential oils
before New Years’ Eve.
Well, sorry, I’m a week late.
And not really done yet.
Instead of getting it done now, lets make this the first in a series on odours,
and, lets say, the make up of make up.
hans
