A Lesson in Memory and Preservation

When I left for my trip over the summer, I tidied up my desk, put things away, stacked papers in order of importance so that when I got home, I could dive into the ‘ideas’ there. When I came home, though, my desk was wrecked, and that neatly piled stack? Not so neat anymore. There were instead broken crayons, sidewalk chalk, used tissue, a long paperclip chain, and crumpled post it notes with dirty words on them everywhere. Once I had gathered everything back into place and tossed out the trash, I realized something was missing. Something important. Something that had been with me from the very beginning – my original formulations notebook. A large, hefty book that has served as the Scented Djinn’s grimoire since 2004 – I picked it up at a stationary store the same year that I shut down my live shop, Delicia. In fact, it has several original Delicia (a Natural Skincare Delicatessen) recipes for lush body butters, extravagant soaps, and body scrubs galore.

And it has everything in it – formulations over the years, all of my original material evaluations, ideas that were flops, notes to self about ‘fixing’ them, observations that helped found the perfumery and incense courses, original iterations of ‘The Ram’ – everything! Though there’s a very good chance it’s just languishing under a heap of paperwork somewhere, it is alarming that this notebook - the main one out of dozens – is missing. It’s also not lost on me that this is the second important item that’s gone AWOL while I was away.

I do, however, have another much smaller, more polished notebook that is right under my hand as I write this – this one contains all of the incense, soap, and perfume formulations from the past three years tucked away in its pages. Sad thing is, I’m on the last seven pages before I have to crack open a whole new notebook, and around here, idle pages have a funny way of disappearing. It’s time to put all of this in order (once the big book is found), printed out and saved to a thumb drive or ten.

Creative work is precious, but memory can be fragile, especially now, after having COVID, when it sometimes takes me a little longer to piece things together. Notebooks get lost, papers scatter, laptops go missing, but the value of what you’ve made doesn’t have to disappear. Taking the time to preserve, collate, and back up your work is part of the art itself.