It may be too soon for Christmas lists (or maybe not), however I have recently been exploring and loving fragrances from Aftelier Perfumes.  I think any of these will be on the top of my wish list.

Weeks ago I ordered some samples.  Since they arrived, I have been savouring them slowly.  Each fragrance is unique and stunning.  I love all of these scents, which may come as no surprise — remember my rhapsody for Jasmine?  They are wonderful, each one.

Here are a few of them, in no particular order:

Honeyblossom — so sweet and soft and lovely, with that poignant intriguing background of ambergris, which adds a depth and mystery.  Pure honey, light and sweet and clear and pale gold.  When I was little I used to suck the honey from the honeysuckle flower, and bury my face in the sweet scent which wafted from the flowering branches.   I love finding these same scents here — something honey and something honeysuckle — along with a light orange blossom, and a floaty mimosa.   And anyway — my last name is basically Honeyblossom, kind of.  I love it.

Prive Parfum has a delicious powdery fruitiness.   And it’s light scattering through a prism — all the different colors of the rainbow glowing.  It’s the sunset sparkling on the water — a shiny glowy sunset, sparkly and rich.  It is a beautiful flowery and mysterious tapestry — intriguing, sexy, inviting.  Amazing.

Wildflowers Solid is innocent and free  – the meadow covered with flowers, fresh grass and newly mown hay. I am lying in the grass in the sunshine, a little sweat and a lot sweet, and a touch of lime.  I could lie with Wildflowers for hours, forever maybe.

Rose and Fir Solid: I have the double solid, one scent on each side.  The rose is layered: it is gentle like delicate petals opening, but it also has a depth which draws me closer.  It’s the archetypal rose which means love over and over again. The fir scent is a forest with dappled light, a thick fruitiness mixed with trees and earthiness and sunshine.

Layered together, fir and rose are a wonderful combination — the evergreen scent lifts the sweetness of the beautiful rose.  It’s the perfect feeling of togetherness and warmth.   It is a straight, tall and deep green balsam fir-tree in a snow-covered forest, which in your dream is suddenly covered with velvety red roses and flickering candles.

Lumiere is soft, sweet, sexy, dreamy.  Like falling in love.  Fresh and tender and grown up all at once.

Candide is fruity and delicious and yummy and joyful to me.  I love jasmine, and here it is in my favorite combination — with some fresh and sunny citrus.  It’s like being covered with joy, and tasting laughter and smiles, and hearing happiness.

Fig is luscious and rich and fruity and a little spicy.  It is sexy and poignant, and little dark. I ate a lot of figs this summer.  They hung heavy from the trees around my house.  I picked them from the branches and ate them on the spot — warmed from the sun, sweet to taste — red and jammy inside, tender to touch.

For me, Haute Claire  begins green and fresh, like a beautiful bright spring morning with a citrus lift.  and then I am surrounded by rich and sweet flowers — ylang ylang and honeysuckle — and the green herbiness of clary sage. All this balanced by the earthiness (and that deep-breathing-feeling) of vetiver.  I find the scent lifting and happy and grounding at the same time.  Also it feels flirty to me at first:  a wink.  And then the earthiness comes: after the wink, holding hands.

I’ve read Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side, (I am a fan of his and I am currently reading The Big Short) and I’ve seen the movie.  Here he is talking about the story that inspired his book.

I enjoyed Leigh Ann Touhy’s speech.  She is feisty and spunky and loving.

She spoke about her experiences as a mother to Michael Oher, a homeless boy she adopted.

Having a place to call home is so important, and her courage and generosity of heart in making a family home for this child is wonderful.

Touhy stressed in her speech that many of us tend to turn a blind eye to those in need.  It is almost hard not to block out the needy, the sick, the poor —  it can be overwhelming, sometimes, to take notice.  Also,  our own needs are so pressing as to blind us.

Leigh Ann Touhy urges us to step out of our comfort zones and make a difference.  Her own actions are proof that each person can make a difference in the life of another.

Many of the symbols of Easter are symbols of birth and new life.  The little chick.  The soft lamb.  The bright flowers blossoming.

Some Easter symbols seem to speak to both life and death.  Consider the lovely Easter egg, cold and hard, seemingly dead on the outside, but hiding the promise of life within.

The lily, a flower often associated with Easter, can be a symbol for death, for purity, for virtue, for life, for fertility, for abundance.

And the bunny.  The bunny is both a symbol of fertility and of sacrifice.  I have read that bunnies are animals which willingly sacrifice themselves for each other.  I’ve read that if a bunny is being chased by a predator and grows tired, another bunny will willingly enter into the chase to distract the predator.

Fertility and sacrifice often go hand in hand.

Love itself is a kind of sacrifice — we push away our own interests and cares in order to pay attention to and take care of and love another person.

The Ancient Greeks had several terms of for love in its different forms:

Eros –Physical, passionate identification

Philia – friendship, heartfelt

Storge – love of mothers for their children, deep, permanent

Agape – mutual moral warmth, respect, sacrifice

With Easter here, I am thinking about Agape.  About love and sacrifice.

Plato writes of having a training for love, one that starts with Eros, and develops towards Agape.

How do we reach this kind of love called Agape, this respect and this willingness to sacrifice?  Luckily family life, and life in general, gives us lots of opportunities for all the different kinds of love, for practicing love in all its different forms.

Happy Easter! Happy Passover!  Happy Spring! Happy Love!

“Love is blind,” is a common saying.  Shakespeare wrote:   “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;  And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”

It is interesting that Lady Justice, holding her scales, is often depicted wearing a blindfold — justice is blind.  The symbol which represents Libra is a scale.

Libra is ruled by Venus, the goddess of love.  Somehow, Love and Justice have a connection, and they also share blindness.

It is an interesting thought: how to be just in love, and how to bring love into justice.

In the east, in India, there is the lotus flower as a picture of the chakras, so there seems to be a connection between flowers and a person’s soul.  A soul opening up has a relationship to falling in love, and to loving.

The rose is a classic symbol of love in western literature and among western lovers.  It has both beauty, and also, with its thorns, a certain amount of experience.  This contrasted with the lily, a flower of innocence.

In the final lines of T. S. Eliot’s poem Four Quartets, he writes: And all shall be well and/All manner of things shall be well/When the tongues of flame are in-folded/Into the crowned knot of fire/And the fire and the rose are one.

The rose is not consumed by the fire, but one with the fire.  We can hope that for our love life too — on fire, but not burned.

Of course, in addition to their loving message, cut flowers bring color and cheer to any home.  Try to go green:  grow your own flowers –or is it snowing?  Pick a bouquet of wildflowers (if you can find any in winter time).  Or when buying, choose organic, look for the Veriflora seal.  Organic bouquet sells flowers grown in a sustainable way.

Though love and flowers may be intertwined, Valentine’s Day has only fairly recently included the exchange of flowers, it is February after all.  Formerly people had to content themselves with pen, ink and paper.  A little poem is always appreciated around Valentine’s Day.  This brings to mind the old poem “Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, Sugar is Sweet and I love you.“   This catchy verse gets right to the point and is believed to be derived from a poem written by Edmund Spenser in 1590.

And actually, violets were associated with Valentine’s Day in the in the early 1900′s, when florists first recognized Valentine’s Day as an opportunity.  Purple (for violets) was also the color associated with the celebration.  But violets are short-lived, which is hopefully not a reflection on (all) romance, and by the mid-century, roses and carnations and pinks and reds were well established as a Valentine’s Day tradition.

Chocolate is a wonderful food, intimately associated with love and romance, a sweet for the sweet.  Chocolate contains several chemicals that promote good feelings, some of which are the same as chemicals the brain produces on its own when a person falls in love.  And falling in love is just the point on Valentine’s day, so a little chocolate might help with the mood.  Casanova mentions chocolate as a stimulant for love in his Memoirs, and he apparently knew what he was talking about.  Or he at least had an idea about the seduction part.

With chocolatiers (is that a word?) popping up all over the place, going local is a great way to support your local sweet makers.

My problem with chocolate these days is the sugar — though certainly the extra high energy of the sugar and also the caffeine in chocolate might assist a romantic evening.  However, like any good self-denying descendant of the puritans, I choose to refuse the pleasures of refined sugar and corn syrup.

Luckily, these days it is easy to find chocolate sweetened in other manners, say with agave or honey.  And I like raw chocolate too (though I wouldn’t thumb up my nose at cooked, mind you).   Blissed Out Chocolates are heavenly; they are raw, sweetened with Agave.  I like the mint flavored especially.  Hail Merry has yummy raw chocolates too, their Miracle Tart is, well, miraculous.

Chocolate with strawberries is a winning combination, and Valentine’s Day bonus:  Strawberries look like little hearts!

If you are reading this and your mouth is watering and it is snowing outside, well don’t forget the pleasures of hot chocolate.  Daily Juice makes a wonderful hot chocolate mix called Chocolate Prana, it’s got a little kick of cayenne in it.  They might send you a jar if you ask them.  But I’m not sure the puritans would approve.

What are your favorite flowers and chocolates?  Or perhaps a Valentine’s Day massage and bubble bath is more your (leisurely) speed.  Just enjoy your Valentine’s Day!  Fill it with love and pleasure.  And take it slow (ly).  It’s more fun that way anyway!

Since children learn by example, how we relate to others is very important.  The kindness and concern we show towards those around us is imitated by our children, as is the frustration and intolerance.

One way to help peel away the racism and hatred that exists is to teach our children to be interested in others, in their stories and in their lives.  We do this by cultivating this interest ourselves.  Sometimes this comes naturally (there are always individuals for whom we seem to have a special affinity), sometimes it is an interest we must cultivate consciously.  And interest and attention, seeing another person, is itself a form of love.

Parents know that we may teach our children a little about a little, but what they teach us is a lot about a lot.  This is true when thinking about love too.  Imagine the baby looking at it’s mother or father, gazing up with complete devotion and love.  Paying attention to our babies and the way they love is a good way to learn about love.  And then imagine spreading that kind of devotion and love to those beyond our family circle.  Almost hard to imagine, but something to strive for.

The Word ‘respect‘ comes from the Latin respectus, meaning ‘to look back at, regard, consider.’  In it’s origin, ‘respect‘  has a sense of looking and seeing another person.  It’s like love in that way, because love can also be thought of as the ability to really see another human being.

46 years ago Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous speech.  In it he describes his dream:  that through hope and faith, freedom will ring across the land.

And what happens at home really does provide the basis for this freedom, for it is at home that we and our children can learn to love and respect others.

This mentality lends itself, Hochschild figures, to the American phenomenon of high divorce rates and multiple relationships.  We speed date, get into relationships, and then break up, in a faster and faster cycle of discontent. In things and in relationships, we are always seeking the next new thing.

In response to Fast Food, we have the Slow Food movement.  In response to Hurried Parenting, we have the Slow Parenting movement.  Maybe, Hochschild proposes, we need a Slow Love movement to balance the American tendency towards having “a curiously consumerist approach to love.”

It does seem true that it is harder and harder to slow down (we are all so busy) and that this tendency towards speed and rushing invades many facets of life, love including.