One of my favourite ways to start the day is a little walk in Coal Harbour. Just a few blocks down Bute Street you'll find Harbour Green park and a little aquaplane airport, from which you can take off any time of the day and fly to Victoria, Nanaimo, the Sunshine Coasts and who knows where else...

I call this my little "morning commute", a necessary piece of fake routine that's paramount for the well-being of someone working from their residential space, in a city that never stops raining. It's easy to find excuses to never leave the house (all good ones too - work that needs to be done, errands around the house, and the desire to throw in a good Pilates routine by the fireplace before doing anything else). But this breath of fresh air, the little connection to the world around me (no matter how alienated and cold it might seem from the warmth of my own abode, and never mind that half of the people outside are absorbed in their cellphones).

Coal Harbour is increasingly populated by taller and larger glass towers, which are pretty - but also completely block the sun in the afternoon. That's why I save Sunset Beach for my evening walks... And in summer mornings (which is when the above photo was taken, though it's hard to tell the season from this photograph...), the green grass is dewy and sometimes even intensely fragrant if it was just cut (which it was on the morning when I took these notes).

My favourite part of my faux daily commute is watching the airplanes take off the water, waiting for that exact moment in time and space where the splashy, noisy trail they leave in the water disappears, and they transform from a fast surfing duck into a flying hawk, circling above the harbour before heading to their destination. And of course - this doesn't come without smell either. Jet fuel never smelled sweeter and more exotic then when mingled with the salty air of seaweed drying in the sun at low tide. Animalic, fishy and verging on the disgusting, but smells like music to my nose.

Last night I finally received the missing piece - one raw material that I terribly needed to get started on this perfume: seaweed absolute. Unlike the seaweed oil I have used in New Orleans and Orcas - this one in full strength is quite disgusting actually; unless you think of it as a packet of hijiki seaweed with the potential of becoming a favourite dish...

And so my composing have began, and not on a very positive note, naturally. I added the seaweed absolute along with a few essences that will make the "jet fuel" accord and the result is, ahum, maybe realistic enough to remind one of the real-life source of inspiration - but certainly not what I'd put on before a night on the town. Or any time, for that matter. However, I stopped right at the exact moment before I would waste too much material and started contemplating juxtaposing this horrific accord with other more delicate and refreshing notes of cut grass, linden blossom and such (all of which remind me of Coal Harbour, of course) and I think I'm off to a pretty good start in my adventure. As long as I don't use it as an excuse to not leave the house tomorrow morning...

With the new year, come what most people call "resolutions". Annual cycles of any sort (no matter which calendar or landmarks you're using), offers an opportunity to reflect, re-assess our values, and set goals for bettering ourselves and the world around us. I've been a long-time believer that doing what you love every day, dedicating even a small amount of time each day to the things that really count - will bring success and a sense of accomplishment in an otherwise pretty chaotic and stressful world. I'm pretty happy with the daily routine I've established over the years so you won't see me signing up for any special classes at the gym just in January or opting for some crazy fad diet. I like to keep my life balanced and healthy year around. And I believe, that unless I'm traveling, I'm doing a pretty good job. This routine (a very boring name for something that I find quite magical and crucial for my own happiness) seems to keep my life balanced, which is not an easy feat being a one-woman-show in every area in my life (for those who are late comers to this blog - my business is a one woman show, and so is my household, where I am the only responsible adult caring for my teenage daughter who's experiencing a rather jolly autistic life).

So instead of resolutions, I've decided to set very specific goals for this year. And perhaps, with the peer pressure I'm putting on myself announcing it to the world on this blog (well, I know not ALL of the world is reading it!). One of them is finishing and publishing my book .
The other goals are traveling to fun places, besides visiting my family in Israel. For the first time ever in my life I'm actually feeling wanderlust. And for that, I will have to save a little fortune, especially since I'll be traveling with my daughter most of the time... So first I will have to work even harder than I ever have, and then we shall see...

Process is one of the most fascinating thing. Processing information. Creative process. They're all so personal, whimsical, and irrational. But in the end - once everything is completed - it all makes sense. And the process has such a huge impact on what the end "product" or "conclusion" as well.

Being a task-oriented person, I have a tendency to get swallowed and consumed by certain projects. It's not so much that I am focused on the end result, as much as I just get very carried away with completing each aspect of the project. And it's not that I don't enjoy the process. It's just that it becomes very much of a physically painful non-stop thing. Be it writing a mass email (something that takes me one day of work at best - and more realistically, 2-3 working days, to put together all the content, photographs and programming). Database updates are just as worst, and so is filing my taxes. Once I sit down to do it - I will very unlikely leave my seat till the job is done. Which is why I often procrastinate the getting started part...

I'm trying to change my ways this year so it doesn't hurt so much... And the first step is think about it differently. What if the task wasn't finishing up the whole book about at least 100 essential oils that I'm working on? How about - my task is to dedicate an hour each day for writing about one. It will only take 100 days to get through them, and won't hurt nearly as much. And 100 days is just a little over three months. Not bad at all.

I've done a similar thing last year when I had to transition from one method of measurement to another in my formulas. It meant needing to weight out and record each formula again, at least twice. Lord, was it tedious. I was not looking forward to it. But how I went about it was that I did it with formulas that I needed to mix up a new batch for anyway. And I'm almost done with that - I've got only about half a dozen perfumes left that require this attention. And I actually quite enjoyed it - learning a lot in the process.

I hope that with this new approach of mine, of just taking one day at a time, and breaking down my tasks (so that my task-oriented personality stays happy and feels accomplishments every day, instead of frustrations about not being able to write about 100 oils all in one day). This is quite a mammoth project, and it was in the making for quite sometime. It really deserves to materialize into more than just a few notes here and there for several of the raw materials I work with. I really want to give each one of them a nice little chapter. In a lot of ways, each materials is a chapter in my own life - so there is more to it for me than just analyzing their scents and looking up information in reference books. It's creative in more ways than I can tell you right now. You will just have to read for yourself once the book is ready!

"Ankle deep, he waded through the bluebells. His spirit rose and exalted... as he breathed in the sun-drenched air. The glorious day was in its last decline. Long shadows lay on the sward... and from above the leaves dripped their shimmering drops of gold-green light.
Moths and butterflies swarmed in merry hosts... flittering here, glimmering there.

She's on a quest. But aren't we all? Traveling as far away from her heart as possible. Seeing it or hearing its soft murmur of desperate longing only hurts more. Avoidance of dwelling taken literally. There is no room to dwell. There is no dwelling. There is no home or a permanent residence for those torn between love and forgetfulness. Far away as metal wings could take her, she will continue to walk through the less traveled paths. Only occasional butterflly will stir the air she breathes in the cold peaks of lonely serenity.

Only wandering, moving on can soothe this blue heart of a butterfly.