Abundant Universe

A British Airways Concorde aircraft as it rotates on take off with condensation over the wings From Concorde and steam locomotives to ancient trees and storm-driven seas, some experiences seem able to retain their power to fascinate and inspire us no matter how often we encounter them.  During my years flying and working in aviation, aircraft were simply a part of everyday life. Yet Concorde was one type that never quite became ordinary. It possessed a combination of qualities that was difficult to ignore. There was the sleek, almost impossibly elegant shape. There was the distinctive drooping nose that contributed to the aircraft's unmistakable appearance. There was the unique sound of the engines, rising steadily into a thunderous roar as take-off power was applied and the aircraft surged forward down the runway. Heathrow was no stranger to noise, yet the sound of Concorde demanded attention and was instantly recognisable. Above all, there was a dominant sense that this was something rather special. Concorde was in a category of its own. What made this remarkable was not that visitors stopped to watch. It was that people who spent their working lives around aircraft still found themselves pausing to look up. Engineers, baggage handlers, pilots, managers and office staff alike would interrupt whatever they were doing for a few moments to stand and stare as Concorde accelerated down the runway and climbed away into the distance. The same people had witnessed the spectacle countless times before. They knew exactly what was about to happen. Yet somehow the experience remained impossible to ignore. Concorde was by no means the only experience that retained its power despite familiarity. The same phenomenon can still be observed in places far removed from airports and aviation. Steam locomotives provide another example. Those that remain continue to attract and captivate crowds. There is something about the sight, sound and commanding presence of a steam locomotive that helps explain why.   A giant steam engine, wreathed in steam, hauling a passenger train  A piercing whistle announces its departure. Steam billows into the air. Machinery clanks and hisses into life. Then comes the familiar exhaust beat as the locomotive gathers power and begins very slowly to haul itself and its train of carriages out of the station. Every movement is accompanied by sound, steam, the distinctive smell of hot oil and coal smoke, plus visible and audible exertion. Intermittently emitted clouds of steam drift across the platform, sometimes engulfing everything and everybody nearby, adding still further to the unforgettable and astoundingly noisy spectacle. People will often travel considerable distances and wait patiently for an event lasting only a few moments. They already know what they are going to see and hear. Yet familiarity seems to do nothing to diminish the attraction. Nor is this fascination confined to remarkable machines. There is also the almost irresistible attraction of a wild coastline when mountainous seas are battering themselves against rocks and cliffs with tremendous force. Anyone who has stood watching during stormy weather will recognise the phenomenon. Long after common sense might suggest remaining indoors – or at least keeping a respectful distance – people still find themselves drawn towards the spectacle. Enormous storm-lashed seas over-topping a small town sea wall Whether viewed from a rugged cliff top or from the paved promenade of a normally peaceful seaside resort, the effect can be equally compelling. Familiar surroundings are transformed by the immense power of wind and water. Towering waves rise and crash with astonishing force. Vast clouds of spray are hurled into the air. Wind tears at clothing and occasionally threatens to sweep the unwary from their feet. For a few moments the sea retreats, only to gather itself and return with renewed force. Occasionally such storms cause significant damage to coastlines and structures that lie in their path. Yet it is not only the destructive power of such storms that attracts attention. Despite the wind, the noise and the discomfort, people remain. Cameras emerge. Conversations cease. Eyes stay fixed upon the unfolding drama. The spectacle is every bit as awe-inspiring as that of a steam locomotive or a departing Concorde. There is the immense power on display. There is the sense of witnessing something both beautiful and untamed. Yet, just as with Concorde and steam locomotives, none of this is new to those who have come to watch. They know what they are going to see. The sea has performed the same display countless times before. Yet familiarity does nothing to diminish its appeal. People continue to stop, watch and marvel. What is it about such experiences that allows them to retain their appeal long after familiarity ought to have diminished it? Perhaps part of the answer is that they momentarily lift us out of the ordinary. For a few moments, our attention is captured completely. We stop thinking about shopping lists, emails, household chores and countless other concerns. We simply watch. One enormous Californian Redwood Tree in the foreground of a forest of smaller Redwoods Yet the same phenomenon can be found in quieter places too. Visitors travel thousands of miles to stand beneath California's giant sequoias, some of which were already ancient when the stories of Robin Hood first began to circulate. Others seek out the remarkable bristlecone pines of the American West, trees that were already growing when the pyramids of Egypt were being built. Closer to home, generations have paused beneath ancient oaks whose branches may have been spreading across the English countryside while Norman kings ruled the land and medieval cathedrals were still taking shape. The same attraction appears in seasonal spectacles. Each autumn, visitors travel from around the world to witness the magnificent displays of colour that transform the forests of New England into vast landscapes of gold, scarlet, crimson and bronze. Many have seen the spectacle before, yet return year after year. Spring brings its own displays as blossom briefly transforms trees and shrubs, while woodlands carpeted with bluebells and immense Dutch tulip fields stretching towards the horizon continue to attract admirers generation after generation. Glorious multi-coloured trees to the horizon in a New England Fall scene The details differ, but the underlying experience is remarkably similar. Certain sights, sounds and experiences seem able to bypass familiarity altogether. No matter how often we encounter them, they retain the ability to stop us in our tracks and make us look again. Perhaps that is one of life's quieter gifts. In a world that often encourages us to hurry from one task to the next, there remain certain experiences that invite us simply to pause, watch and appreciate. And perhaps the fact that we continue to appreciate them is something to be grateful for. https://theabundantuniverse.com/pages/about-us    

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Of all our senses, smell is perhaps the most anarchic. It refuses to wait for an invitation. A thread of woodsmoke on an autumn evening, the dampness of earth after rain, the sweetness of newly cut grass drifting over a garden fence — and we are somewhere else entirely, returned without warning to a moment we had not thought about in years. I have written before about the strange power of scent to ambush memory, and the more I have reflected on it, the more it has seemed to me that something so potent and so immediate deserves more than our passive surrender to it. What, I found myself wondering, might it mean to invite that power deliberately into our lives rather than simply waiting to be caught off guard by it? Aromatherapy — a word that can sound either faintly clinical or faintly mystical depending on your disposition — is at its heart simply the intentional use of scent to influence mood and wellbeing. Its practitioners would say, with some justification, that they are doing nothing more than formalising what human beings have always known instinctively. We have been reaching for fragrant plants, resins and woods in moments of ceremony, healing and comfort for as long as we have records of doing anything at all. What has changed is that we now understand a little of why it works — and that understanding, rather than diminishing the experience, seems to me to deepen it. The use of aromatic plants and resins for healing, ritual and pleasure is as old as civilisation itself. In China, the systematic use of aromatic plants in medicine and wellbeing was documented thousands of years ago, woven into a tradition of extraordinary sophistication. In India, the Ayurvedic system — perhaps the world's oldest codified approach to health — placed fragrant oils and herbs at the centre of its understanding of body, mind and spirit. The ancient Egyptians burned frankincense and myrrh in their temples and incorporated fragrant oils into their funerary rites. Ancient Greek physicians wrote of the therapeutic properties of aromatic herbs, and the distillation techniques that gave us essential oils as we know them were refined by Arab scholars in the medieval period. The word aromatherapy itself is surprisingly recent, coined in the 1930s after a French chemist discovered, somewhat accidentally, the remarkable healing properties of lavender oil. That the word is new should not mislead us — the practice it describes is ancient, universal and deeply human. It is a knowledge that has also found its way into both the modern pharmaceutical industry, which draws on many of the same plant compounds, and the world of fine perfumery, where essential oils have always provided much of the perfumer's palette.  The plants that yield our most valued essential oils are individually remarkable and worth knowing a little about before we consider what they offer. Lavender, perhaps the most universally loved of all aromatic plants, grows wild on the limestone hillsides of Provence and the western Mediterranean, its silver-grey stems and violet flowers inseparable from that landscape. That its oil soothes, calms and supports sleep is something even those with no interest in aromatherapy tend to know — perhaps the best evidence of how deeply this knowledge is embedded in our culture. Frankincense takes us to a starker and more remote landscape — the arid terrain of Oman, Yemen and the Horn of Africa, where the small Boswellia tree produces a resin harvested and traded for at least five thousand years. Its smoke was familiar in the temples of ancient Egypt, the courts of Solomon and perfumed the great mosques of the medieval Arab world. It remains among the most widely used of all ritual incenses — burned in Christian churches from the Orthodox east to the Catholic west, and in many churches in Britain, almost always alongside myrrh. Its essential oil carries a gravitas and depth that makes it perhaps the most contemplative of the oils in common use. Eucalyptus brings us to the dry open forests of Australia, where tall, fast-growing trees fill the air with a sharp, clean fragrance that is instantly recognisable. Its properties are similarly direct — clarifying, invigorating, particularly valued for its effect on the respiratory system. If frankincense invites stillness, eucalyptus invites a deep breath and a clearing of the head. Peppermint, familiar from the hedgerows and herb gardens of Britain, is one of those plants whose properties seem almost too well matched to their character to need explanation. Its cool, sharp oil is energising and focusing, long used to ease headaches and sharpen concentration — a remedy country people knew intuitively long before it entered formal medicine. Bergamot comes from one of the most particular of all habitats — a small citrus fruit grown almost exclusively on a narrow coastal strip in Calabria, where soil, climate and sea air combine to produce something found nowhere else. Its oil, cold- pressed from the rind, has a brightness and complexity — floral, fruity, faintly spicy — that has made it indispensable to the perfumer's art for centuries and gives Earl Grey tea its distinctive character. In aromatherapy it is valued for its ability to lift mood and ease anxiety — a kind of bottled Mediterranean light. What makes scent so uniquely powerful in its effects on how we feel? The answer lies in a quirk of our anatomy that sets smell apart from every other sense. Where sight, sound and touch travel to the brain by relatively indirect routes, scent arrives almost immediately at the part of the brain most concerned with emotion and memory, bypassing the rational mind that mediates most of our experience. This is why a smell can return us to a moment twenty years distant before we have had time to think about it, and why a carefully chosen scent can shift our mood, calm our nervous system or sharpen our focus with a directness that no other sensory experience quite matches. There is something quietly transporting about the deliberate creation of a small, beautiful sensory moment in the middle of an ordinary day. Not a grand gesture, not an expensive ritual, but simply the filling of a room with a scent chosen for what it does to your state of mind — the calming steadiness of lavender at the end of a difficult afternoon, the meditative depth of frankincense on a winter evening, the bright clarifying lift of eucalyptus on a morning when your thoughts refuse to settle. The means by which this is achieved matters more than one might think. An essential oil burner — a simple, elegant object that asks only a small candle and a few drops of oil — transforms the act from a merely practical one into something with the quality of a ritual. The flame, the warmth, the gradual release of fragrance into the room; these small elements combine into something that signals to the mind, with quiet but unmistakable clarity, that this moment has been set aside. That is, perhaps, what aromatherapy has always really been about — not the chemistry, not the ancient history, not even the remarkable plants from which these essences are drawn, but the human need to mark certain moments as worthy of a little more intention and a little more beauty than we usually allow ourselves.

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