A caveat: This is even more meandering and existential than most of the things I write about perfume. But I have been thinking about trees, about the solstice, and about the long now and the even longer before all through these past weeks of darkness. And I keep coming back to this scent, Relief, while I do.

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Chris Rusak‘s Relief is a treasure I dole out to myself when I need it most, when I need stillness and perspective. Forget the musks and fuzzy ambers and the indoor fug of vanilla-laden baking, this is a comfort scent. If you find comfort in stillness, quiet, and the idea of eternity through change and connection. 

Relief is the thousand year oak silvered with moss*. In the fading light, as the clouds take the warmth away, lie down underneath in the accretion of endless autumns, where the top layers are still crisp with bitter tannins and the under layers have crumbled into rich earth. Curl like a hedgehog or stretch out and sink into the endless web of hair-fine roots meshing the world together. Forget your edges.

Lie still and breathe. 

It’s not still under the tree of course. The trees are breathing too. The trees are talking. 

Relief is one of those rare scents I can smell by remembering it–or at least wrap myself in its shadow, for the feeling of wearing it without breaking into my depleting store. It cycles around in memory.

It was a limited release, and can’t be replaced. And that’s as it should be. The balance between timelessness and ephemerality works with this scent. Perhaps not timelessness, but cycles, endless cycles of time. Not least because perfume can only be enjoyed as it is destroyed, molecule by molecule escaping into the air.

It’s changed in the five years I’ve had it, getting deeper, richer, earthier.

But then nothing is created or destroyed, only transformed. Recycled. Reused.

Transmogrified. 

Maybe you’ll become light or ash, or a shiny little beetle crawling through the leaves, but you’ll never be truly gone. 

When the last drop of Relief is gone, every molecule will still be out there. It will reach you too. Because we are always breathing the history of the planet, breathing molecules from the breath of Caesar, of Shakespeare, of the last stegosaurus. 

And maybe it’s just because of the duck-billed hadrosaur** but I can’t help hearing On Ilkley Moor baht ‘at***

You’re bound to catch your death of cold
Then we shall have to bury thee
Then the worms will come and eat thee up
Then the ducks will come and eat up the worms
Then we shall come and eat up the ducks
Then we shall all have eaten thee

So lie on the earth (with your hat on) and breathe deep while you still can. 

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* there are no myrrh-bearing gum trees in these parts, but we have woodlands with ancient oaks and oakmoss and violets. Find an old tree, where the leaves are left to lie, something that belongs to the place you live, something far far older than you.

** The toy is a Trachodon (one of the duck-billed hadrosaurs, but now a genus considered “dubious”) The wee beast in the picture may be tiny, but a hadrosaurus was around seven to eight metres long. The first one was found in a suitably leafy spot in New Jersey in 1858 and became the official state dinosaur, and the first dinosaur skeleton to be mounted for display.

This toy dinosaur is not made of real dinosaurs, but the dinosaur is made from plastic that was made from petroleum that was once ancient plants and diatoms.

*** translated for those sadly lacking in Yorkshire.