Halcyon In Kaleidoscope

My fascination with perfume - or scents more generally - probably began in suburban teenagehood. My then girlfriend wore Smitty, and I proudly sported Blue Stratos (which trumped my second choice, Old Spice, and was streets ahead of Brut, "fashionable" at the time).

Fast forward the best part of 30 years and a family trip to the perfume museum in Grasse, where the fragrant air, even in the streets outside, and the fabulous design on show inside hooked me once again.

Next was picking up a copy of The Emperor of Scent and trying to understand the scientific processes behind the olfactory skills of Luca Turin.

In late 2016 came my first attempts at creating perfume myself, taught by the inspiring Sarah McCartney and her kind husband at 4160 Tuesdays.

“This is happiness,” Willa Cather’s fictional narrator gasps as he sinks into his grandmother’s garden, “to be dissolved into something complete and great.” A generation later, in a real-life counterpart, Virginia Woolf arrived at the greatest epiphany of her life  - and to this day perhaps the finest definition of what it takes to be an artist - while contemplating the completeness and greatness abloom in the garden.

Above and beyond the (too?) many unread volumes I already have, there are many other books that I'd still like to read, given sufficient life and leisure, including the following:

Imbolc, imbolc, the light will soon return, warm the Earth this winter's night and let the candles burn - from Ancient Dream, by Aeolian Songspell

A time of purification (hence spring cleaning), this is a hopeful time of year, with the days drawing out and even the mornings slowly lightening. Later this month, the first snowdrop and crocus should visit, suggesting that Spring is not far behind.

See also:

Dave Pollard wrote thought-provokingly of the "Now Time”, a multidimensional recursive eternal present familiar to aboriginal cultures the world over, and recalling Friedrich Nietzche's desire to be a "yes-sayer" to each moment.

This recalls Camus' celebration of Sisyphus starting afresh each day and more recently, Eckhart Tolle's "power of now".

T.S. Eliot's legacy remains profound and his poetry moves me deeply.

In 2016 I had the privilege of visiting his final resting place, East Coker.

I read or listen to the peerless Little Gidding often, and almost every line entrances, as if peering through a veil at something once known, but half-forgotten because not looked-for.

In the 1840s Henry David Thoreau swapped his busy schedule in Concord, Massachusetts, for a wooden hut he built himself near Walden Pond. We had the privilege to visit Walden in July 2012; it exceeded expectations in its tranquillity and beauty - and the swim in the pond itself was unforgettable.

Writing in the winter of 1843, shortly after Margaret Fuller’s mentorship made him a writer, the twenty-five-year-old Thoreau awakened to a snow-covered wonderland and marvelled at the splendour of a world reborn.

What if we could honour everyone - the estimated 110 billion or so humans who have ever lived?

Of course, our most urgent challenge right now is to keep working towards the goal of giving everyone alive right now access to basic needs - to water and food, security, health, education etc - and it's painfully clear that, with e.g. growing numbers of orphans around the world, we still have a huge task still ahead of us. (And yes, let's unashamedly say "us", rather than fall back on the third person, abstract term "humanity" that somehow suggests it's someone else's problem.)

Last night I read those letters, and they made me feel one hundred years old - from Stolen Car, Bruce Springsteen

I remember snow falling quietly on 14th Street in New York January 1999 and thinking it the most melancholy, yet most romantic sight imaginable.

I've long held a (completely invented) theory that one can distinguish not only people, but also places, in fact almost anything, by whether it is major- or minor- key dominant.  Here I focus on the minor, which has always felt like my spiritual home.

For me the purpose of life is to know other people…is to discover what life is. Who inhabits the world? What is it to be human? What can I give to the world which it doesn’t have…a gift for tolerating my presence in this world..…and unless I know the people, I can’t know what it does not have - Theodore Zeldin

Imagining seeing how everybody else lives, just for one day.  Life In A Day was a historic global experiment to create a user-generated feature film shot in a single day, July 24 2010.

Since the cave we have tried to make the old gods smile. Each year we fail and winter comes. #CLNolan

"Wings are for flying, not frying" ...nice quote, nicer sentiment.  Animal-friendly consumerism could be a major future trend. Until 16 years ago I too gorged myself on turkey every Christmas Day, Boxing Day, 27th...and my mouth watered long after at the remembered taste of turkey soup on the 28th or 29th, a meal which constituted one of the culinary highlights of my year.

I have long been curious about Pan, probably inspired - as I'm guessing many others have been too - by the beautiful and haunting passage in The Piper at the Gates of Dawn chapter of The Wind in the Willows.

According to the always interesting Maria Popova, artist and writer Austin Kleon was invited to give a talk to students, the backbone for which was a list of 10 things he wished he’d heard as a young creator:

So widely did the talk resonate that Kleon decided to deepen and enrich its message in Steal Like an Artist. While all 10 tips illustrated above make sense, nos. 2, 3, 4, 6 and 10 resonate with me in particular.

Where did everything come from? Where are we heading? Big History tells the story of the Universe starting from the Big Bang, the formation of stars, planets, life on Earth, modern civilisation — and what might exist in the future.

Asking which shifts, in which centuries, really shaped the modern world. a historian identified 10 leading drivers of change, century by century 

Meanwhile, Prospect believes that reflecting on the past can give great insight into the present and has published accordingly The past in perspective e-book.

December 1st comes around again. Grateful to witness it once more. So many memories - the most vivid from Campion Days of old...pushing for almost glory or just plain survival through fields of mud, up frosted hills, leading or trailing friends of yore.

I guess I've been aware of Walt Whitman as an American national icon since I was at university, and have long admired what I may be his most famous poem, I Sing the Body Electric.

It's probably been said many times before, and much more profoundly, and studied and dissected, but the poet's words do indeed seem to crackle with electricity, with vitality, with what Robert Pirsig called in Lila, "dynamic quality". This is a celebration of connecting, of being alive.

"Examine these limbs, red, black, or white—they are so cunning in tendon and nerve; 

They shall be stript, that you may see them.