Aromatherapy, In English, Madagascar, Materia Viva in English

Materia Viva n.10 — Ramy, the resin of Madagascar

Each issue of Materia Viva begins with an aromatic material and follows it the way one follows a trail: not only its scent, but the landscape, the history, the gestures, the images and the words that material carries with it.

ramy canarium madagascariense

This time the thread leads to Madagascar, to the coasts where Ramy grows — Canarium madagascariense, one of the giants of the rainforest, able to reach nearly forty metres in height and two in diameter. It is a tree that lets itself be gathered while walking: the resin flows out on its own along the trunk, and whoever passes by takes a little, in a gesture the local people themselves describe as ordinary. The wood, on the other hand, almost always remains intact. Ramy is among the least felled trees, often the only one left standing in a ploughed field, spared even when firewood is needed.

If you love resins, you may read Materia Viva about Sumatra Benzoin.

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Aromatherapy, Emotional Aromatherapy, In English

Scent, Taste, and What the Mind Cannot Say

There is a language older than words, and it lives in the nose and on the tongue. Scent and flavour travel a direct route to feeling, arriving at the body before thought has time to build its usual story around them.

A note of bergamot, benzoin, a trace of vanilla in the air: these reach us the way a memory does, whole and immediate, long before we have named what we are sensing. Taste works the same way — one bite carries us somewhere specific, a kitchen, a season, a person, faster than language ever could. Both senses seem to answer directly to emotion, bypassing the analytical mind and speaking straight to something older and more embodied.

This is, perhaps, the deepest gift of working with raw aromatic materials: they offer a form of knowing that sits outside explanation. A material can hold real, verifiable qualities and, at the very same time, carry an emotional charge that no amount of description quite exhausts. Both are true together — the precise and the poetic, standing side by side rather than competing for the same ground.

Practising emotional aromatherapy means trusting this dual nature of scent: factual and felt, concrete and resonant, all at once. It offers the body a direct route to emotion, one that asks for nothing more than a single breath.

Esperienze olfattive, scrittura e immagini d'autore

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