The Essentiality of my Essential Oils

Photo of the three essential oils that I used the most this week (L to R):

Uplift (sweet orange), Calmness (geranium, vetiver, grapefruit), Asleep (lavender)

I was unsure what to write about this week because, to be honest, I had a rough week.

My uncle Fred passed away, and I couldn’t go to the funeral or wake, so I had to grieve in isolation away from my family which was difficult. The best thing that I did for myself this week was concentrate on “self-care,” as one does when they are sad, and part of my self-care was putting on my essential oil diffuser in my room to change my mood.

You might be able to tell where this is going. 

When I was being consoled by my friend this week, I told her about this recent self-care practice of mine, and she took out her collection of essential oils to let me smell them and borrow one. For ones like lavender and sage, I realized that I didn’t need to open them to smell them because I could already imagine the scent, probably because I have them in my own collection. This experience reminded me of the kind of “intimate acquaintance” that the rabbis required in order to creatively construct the metaphors that we read. There is a parallel here because, for both of us, our abilities come from our own intimate knowledge. 

Furthermore, I realized that my essential oils are titled by the impact that they have on the user, which is what we also talked about in NHS. My lavender bottle says “Asleep” (pictured above). Green stated this in her introduction: “scents are most often described by simile, metaphor, or metonym…such descriptions are not only difficult with scent; they are almost impossible to grasp if one has not previously experienced the scent.” Green went on to say that scent does not lend itself to memory because “most of us cannot smell the fragrance of an orange by mentally concentrating on the idea,” but, in this situation, I could do so with the essential oils.  

Lastly, in Chapter 6, Green wrote about burial with perfume bottles, and this resonated with me this week, too. She said that “burial with perfume bottles does for the entombed what their loved ones can not do any longer, care for them and surround them with memories of comfort, ease, and well-being.” During a difficult week, the opposite happened to me, as scent provided the comfort and ease that I needed while grieving.