The last few weeks have been intense and hard. My father passed away on August 19, the day after my birthday, and his services were held on my partner Alabaster’s birthday September 1. But my dad came into this world crashing a funeral–his father’s–and so the whole cycle of life seems contained in my dad’s own. Enter the corpse flower, and its day of bloom at the Denver Botanic Gardens on August 31, the morning of the day we were …
Tag: Unconscious
Proust’s Madeleine: The Smell & Taste of Recollection
Many have written on the stunning way smell and by extension taste seem to circumnavigate our intellect to bring us face to face with the past, but few have written the phenomenon so eloquently and influentially as Marcel Proust. At Aromatica Poetica, we acknowledge this famous madeleine scene from the first book of A la Rechearche du Temps Perdu, translated variously as Remembrance of Things Past and In Search of Lost Time, as a foundational text. Here it is excerpted …
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Individuation & the Power of Scent: An Interview With Florian Birkmayer MD
Florian Birkmayer is the kind of multidisciplinary spirit we love at Aromatica Poetica. Trained as a psychiatrist, deeply influenced by Jung, and devoted to the healing power of scent and the natural world, particularly aromatherapy and equine therapy, his practice has led him to found Aromagnosis with his wife Cathy Skipper. Together they are developing an online and live learning curriculum that is truly unique, including classes such as Alchemy, Aromatherapy and Medicine of the Soul, Intuitive Plant Communication, Hydrosols …
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