"Butterfly Maiden is the female fertilizing force. Carrying the pollen from one place to another, she cross-fertilizes, just as the soul fertilizes the mind with nightdreams, just as archetypes fertilizes the mundane world. She is the center. She brings the opposites together by taking a little from here and putting it there. Transformation is no more complicated than that. This is what she teaches. This is how the butterfly does it. This is how the soul does it.

Butterfly Woman mends the erroneous idea that transformation is only for the tortured, the saintly, or only for the fabulously strong. The Self need not carry mountains to transform. A little is enough. A little goes a long way. A little changes much. The fertilizing force replaces the moving of mountains." (Clarissa Pinkola-Estes, Women Who Run With The Wolves, p. 209-210)

I found great solace and inspiration in this thought. Some days, and especially in a year like this one (when it seems that all hell has broken loose in so many parts of the world - and it would take a miracle to not turn into a 3rd world war - if we're not already there) - making perfumes is not something that seems too important.

To know that even the smallest of changes could be the seed for transformation, is truly meaningful to me. While perfumery originates from alchemy, this is a concept so foreign to modern-day living, where so much of our life goes by fast-forward, and we can barely scratch the surface of superficiality in so many of our interactions or areas of interests.

Perfume has changed my life, and even in times like this, when I stand helpless facing the horrors that are abound the world over; when I feel like a very small piece of the puzzle, I need to remember this. Perfume may just mean a toiletry, a status symbol, or a token of love to some. But even a small thing like a drop of perfume can change the way you feel. Even if it will just mean a woman feels connected to her wildish nature and her inner self one night, after dabbing a perfume on - it still accounts to something. Maybe it will stir something inside her. Maybe it will awaken her to understand a certain aspect of herself better.

A speck of pollen dust on the feet of a butterfly may not seem like much - a pigment, a powder - but has the power to pass on genetic information and turn a flower into fruit and grow seeds. A seed in the ground is quite and dormant, but hides the potential to transform into a massive babobab tree - and with it transofrming the earth around it, providing food and shelter for animals and other life forms.

A drop of perfume. Inhale. Exhale. Cross-pollination. Inspiration. Transformation is subtle. It is part of us, ever changing us as our cells divide, multiply and die. And as we grow and inspire others, we are part of it too...