Welcome! Here is a Cypress Welcome to our Blog. We will include extracts from ‘Re-wilding the Cycle PDF’, published articles from IFPA & Aromatherapy Today, essays, plant poetry and meditations that we hope will support your practice and deepen your connection with essential oils.
To welcome is to honour life.
In the moment we welcome an ‘other’, we encounter a threshold between kingdoms, realities, space and time.
‘The other’ is excluded no more.
When we are welcomed by another, we are seen, beheld and honoured by them. We receive permission to exist as a seperate entity, valid, with meaning.
Welcome gives life then; indeed, it is the spirit of life that appears in that instant between kingdoms.
Cypress is the tree of welcome and of eternal life.
Extract from Cypress, Re-wilding the Cycle
BREATHING
Inhale and exhale normally, but after your exhalation, allow the absense of breath to create and explore ‘the void’, welcoming darkness as a friend, being hidden as relief, surrendering as deep peace. Less is more.
Behold! The dark desert, the craving abyss, the silent expanse, the endless vacuum.
If I am not seen, do I exist?
Who sees me, if no one is looking?
I cross the shadowlands unnoticed,
released from gravity and form
I float, invisible at last.
‘Red‘ by Marina Berdolet, Oil on Canvas
Subtlety: It’s almost a relief, in this day and age to not be bombarded sensorially. Cypress expressed itself subtly in a long olfaction of 30 minutes. Sometimes, aromas tend to ‘disappear’ as they ‘play’ with our senses. Some are simply, subtle, with many gentle nuances, almost hiding. Cypress was described as gentle, soft, deep, balanced and balancing, harmonious. Dark spaciousness, deep strength, supportive. In these ‘subtle’ places, we must wait for happening. Nothing more to do but sit back and be gently drawn in, submerged or bouyed into the olfactive landscape.
THERE,
Don’t try
Let it
emerge
happen
THERE
the expanse
suspended
let it
breathe.
WHERE
can’t hold
evaporation
the end
is it?
We cannot force our entry. Perhaps these aromas can be described as slow or older. (Coniferous trees are indeed older genetically than aromatic flowers.) Perhaps it’s akin to listening to an older language, where so many symbols hide, waiting to be uncovered by patient noses. When aromas are this subtle, the imagination has a tendancy to wander or, rather, to become activated. It’s possible then, after a while to start a strange dialogue with the aroma (ask permission first, it’s more polite!), where perhaps there’s a field of resonance that enables us to ask the essence questions about what is being revealed through the olfaction. Sometimes the reply brings us to a place of humility, a realisation that our understanding and vocabulary is but a speck before the functioning of deep time healings, embodied in this, Cypress essence. We simply sit in wonder before phenomenahhh; We are in the presence of a mystery too grand for words.
A state I invite,
an aroma I invoke,
a shadow I rest in,
a sense I smoke.
‘Unbelievable Space’, an improvisation by Frances & Carles Marigó, Piano.
A Cypress Blessing
Stand quite tall.
Don’t think small
but look up high
and be free to explode
into heaven
your desires and plans
that will shine in endless layers of stars
above you.
Jump,
and Cypress will guide your feet
towards the next safe place.
Cypress will cloak you in the cold,
hood you in the rain
and shelter you from the wind.
Rest inside.
Breathe into your heart’s home
all that is trustworthy and good.