A to Z Blogging Challenge: A is for Aromatherapy

A is for Aromatherapy.

Once upon a time, people were more attuned to the world through their senses than we are now. Survival dictated that touch, seeing, hearing, tasting, and smelling--the last two by design intertwined--would protect fragile human beings in a harsh wilderness world. Before there were civilized societies, a person could literally smell and capitalize on an opponent's fear. I'm guessing that it's only been in the last century or so that we've lost much of our sensory acuity and abilities.

You can follow a trail of contaminated breadcrumbs leading right to the culprit for this loss. What was the word of career advice that Dustin Hoffman's character in The Graduate received and that sums up our grandest achievement as a civilized society? Plastics! Move forward, young man, into the New Age of Synthetics. Science has managed to duplicate just about anything you can imagine in nature, and the result is anything but natural. 

Now we can have it all. Fake boobs. High-beam smiles. Perpetual any-color-but-gray hair. Stuff resembling food that you pick up on the way home so you can spend more time with those various boxes made with plastic. The ones with little people in them who tell you what to think, believe, feel, desire. Other boxes to record and store your words and send them on to other people with similar boxes. 

Craving escape from the World of Fake, I garden and walk in the woods as often as possible. It's not enough. It never is. I want convenience, and I want it in a concentrated dose. Soothing herbs and flowers and grasses and trees in bottles. One drop at a time. Not quite the elusive cure for Snores-Bores-Squeaky-Doors Syndrome but pretty close to it. It keeps the muse happy, anyway. And she can't smell the fear. What a slave driver. Back to the box I go.

See A to Z Blogging Challenge for links to more "A's" from Challenge sponsors and other writers.