Life In the Slow Lane.
Our family likes to take its time. With 5+ kiddos, we don’t easily move very quickly, so maybe it’s more like we just take time. Recently we moved to a house with 3 working toilets. That’s 3 times the number of toilets we had at our last house. Aside from reveling in the joy of parallel elimination, I now had to get more soap. More toilets means (hopefully) more sinks which means more hand soap. I really liked a grapefruit and thyme hand soap I tried a while back and thought about making it. So I started shopping around for the thyme and grapefruit oils and of course, that got me thinking. . .
I grow thyme in my herb beds. It’s a friendly, hardy, ground hugging herb just about everywhere, and it’s nice to look at too. And I thought about all of the ways our family uses thyme: in veggie and chicken stock, in bouquets, as a ground covering, in tea. We have roses, sage, and a variety of other plants we enjoy in other various ways. And most of those ways are decidedly slow. (Mental note: dig up herbs to transplant into beds at the new house.)
18,000 Cups of Tea. Essential?
The thyme flavor and properties imparted to the chicken bone broth (that took 3 days to make in the slow cooker) stands in stark contrast with a few drops of thyme essential oil I could choose to use on or in our bodies in a myriad of ways, including in some hand soap.
Today’s essential oils, in their amber glass, were thought to be the “life force” of a plant. Evaporation and distillation were thought to reduce a plant down to its quintessence. We know today that the effects of plant chemistry on humans can be intensified through the use of essential oils. I began to wonder about just how magnified and intensified this effect might be.
Apparently it takes over 9 kg (20 lb) of rose petals to make 5 mL or 100 drops of rose essential oil. Wow, This stands in contrast to the 0.5 g I would use to make a cup of rose petal tea. So just to put it into perspective, I need to drink 18,000 cups of rose petal tea to get the equivalent amount of rose-i-ness in a 5 mL bottle of essential oil. Just think about that. If you use just one drop of rose oil, you are putting the equivalent of 180 cups of tea on or into your body all at once. With lavender, it’s about 10 cups of tea per drop of essential oil. Lots of variation here, but the message is the same.
But what if the essence of a thing was never meant to be reduced down to its quick-acting medicinal effects, but instead enjoyed throughout its life cycle, cultivated for the whole experience of the plant? Heck, even just one tiny piece — the hydration factor in drinking all of that tea — that would make a difference in my health.
Essence in Everyday Life
The act of planting the root starts and seeds, stooping to feel dirt between my fingers, this brings me life. Squatting as I pluck the leaves and petals uses my body and gets me out of doors. Deadheading flowers, pruning shrubs, and drying sprigs does something in my soul as well as my body. Boiling a kettle of water and making tea, or starting a tincture or extract in glycerine or alcohol, all bring life in everyday, minute ways. I might argue, that a life of these kinds of tasks, might help me to avoid the medicinal uses for these plants. There is a place for medicine, don’t get me wrong, but the reductionist, instant-results mindset we often desire when we purchase and use things like essential oils easily short circuits the way we were created, the way we were intended to live in harmony with our bodies and our environment.
And don’t even get me started on the sustainability of those 18,000 cups of rose tea in that little amber bottle. Or who is collecting those sprigs and petals and what their lives are like.
So I didn’t buy those thyme or grapefruit essential oils. I’m thinking about ways to get the full essence of the grapefruit (which we eat a LOT of already) and the thyme (from the good old herb beds) into some plain hand soap instead. I’m not telling you to not buy and use those oils. But you might want to stop and ask just what the essence of that thing is, and if its full essence might do you better than one amazingly quick and intense crazy drop at a time.