Everlasting to Everlasting

“I will see the season through. I will fix my eyes on you. Only You.”

Received a fresh batch of raw ingredients—hand-carried from Melbourne on business class, no less—and decided to catch up on my balms.

The aroma of the creamy ingredients billowed out of the test kitchen, plumes of its round, maternal scent stretched into every room. After a long week, and a four hour nap in preparation of all this blending, it felt so good to just be sustaining 3rd degree burns over that stove, stirring away and breathing those amazing vapours in.

I turned off the stove. Tongs in one hand, tea towel in the other, I was getting ready to lift the Pyrex and its golden liquid out of the boiling pot of water when it slipped out of my grasp. The heavy Pyrex and my precious balms fell back into the pot with a splash, oil and water coagulating.

I can’t describe that moment, save to say I threw the tongs across the room in anger. The time spent sourcing for those raw materials. The effort spent shipping and hard work of my dad and mum, hand-carrying the ingredients. The time spent crafting. The resources. I really could have used a Charlotte Olympia clutch, or putting that cash toward buying more ingredients on my next sourcing trip. Worst of all, I just felt bad. For the ingredients, crazy as it sounds. For the Madagascan vanilla beans I dissected and completely disemboweled. For the bees who freaking spent the summer gathering pollen and producing honey and everything. For beekeepers who got stung collecting the combs. For the goats of that valley in New Zealand for their milk. For the farmers who lovingly grew and harvested organic cocoa beans and everyone else who cold-pressed their crops. All for me to freaking drop my Pyrex when it counted. I was livid.com.

I wondered why the hell I bothered. With any of this. I guess that moment underscored that it’s about love, not the money. If money’s what I wanted, I suppose it’d be easy to head to ChinaKoreaIndiaThailand to get some manufacturer to fabricate something in bulk—jewellery, gross paraffin candles, t-shirts… you get what I mean. But it’s not about commerce. It’s not about mass. It’s not about giving your 3929485th fan on Facebook a lifetime supply of essential oils. Handwriting a few labels alone takes half a day.

Even at the post office, shipping things off to Brooklyn, Mexico and Sydney. It felt hard. Customs, taxes, the safety of the parcels. I put my hands on them, asked for journey mercies, asked for the receivers to be richly blessed by what they were about to receive. You’re literally crafting these things for 12-16 hours over a 48 hour weekend, why the heck wouldn’t you pray for them to be a blessing.

So maybe that was the theme of the week. Exhaustion/Disappointment. With myself, people, things or situations that don’t seem to gel. There has to be a better feeling than anger, of not knowing why things had to go down that route. Guess we’ll know in time, and discover that it was all meant to be.

GRATEFUL FOR Sayher‘s back-of-cab iTunes suggestions (Gungor, Mutemath, William Fitzsimmons and a whole bunch of hipster Hasidic reggae bands… I have no idea), tacos with friends, being able to give my beautiful mum a hug IRL, learning a new & awesome song on the guitar, a break. Peace.