Guerlain, Apres L’Ondee Is there any flower in the world with a name more beautiful than heliotrope? The Greek roots of the nomenclature aren’t too hard to divine: you have helios for the sun, and trepin, which means “to turn,” and it is all quite literal. This flower, most commonly purple and clustered like a day-after bruise, is in a romantic relationship with sunlight from the moment it blooms. It seeks out Vitamin D like a hog looking for truffles, craning its neck, straining its stems. Searching, searching. Of course, the flower’s name being Greek in origin, it is attached to a myth that is both tragic and desperate; this is the story of Clytie, the comely water nymph, one of the three-thousand daughters of Oceanus, the father of the sea but also maybe of everything else. Sometimes, in Greek mythology, Oceanus takes the form of the sea god Titan, but sometimes he is just the ocean itself, the salty slosh encircling the world, the original amniotic fluid. His daughters, the Oceanids, had a mother (Oceanus’ sister Tethys) but she wasn’t really capable of nursing three thousand children; she lost track of a few along the way. The mission of the nymphs was to blanket the world, to spread out far and wide providing women’s labor in its most distant corners; the Oceanids rarely had their own epic adventures. Instead they became an unpaid daycare force, looking after the children of Gods along the banks of rivers, ensuring that the little ones didn’t slip under the current. They became wives, and lovers, and mothers; whorls on expansive family trees. Individual triumph was not in the stars for the water nymphs; so many of them were born to be eyeless anemones, crawling along the seabed looking for bigger stories to suction themselves to in service.
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Hello! I really enjoy your newsletter and have been a subscribing member since you first started it. I filled out a questionnaire at that time that you were going to review and get back with me on some suggested fragrances to try. My subscription just auto renewed and I still have not received them. I really respect the depth of your knowledge and would really like to see what you might suggest. Wondering what might have happened?