A community-listening project on fragrance, memory, and the human calendar

Across cultures, human beings mark time with fragrance.

We burn resins before prayer. We cook spices for festivals. We carry flowers to graves. We light candles in winter darkness. We wash, anoint, decorate, fast, feast, remember, mourn, welcome, and begin again. These aromatic gestures are not merely decorative. They help us carry meaning.

The Aromatic Year is a research and writing project exploring how fragrance participates in cultural, religious, civic, and seasonal observances. The project will inform a future hybrid anthology, currently titled Seasonal Aromatic Poems, which will combine literary reflection, aromatic poetry, cultural listening, and practitioner notes.

This project is not an attempt to replace religious practice, reinterpret sacred tradition, prescribe ritual, or reduce holidays to fragrance formulas. It is not a commercial fragrance collection. It is a listening project first.

My goal is to better understand how fragrance lives in human experience: in kitchens, sanctuaries, cemeteries, gardens, homes, festivals, processions, family tables, and seasons of remembrance. I am especially interested in how aromas help people carry joy, grief, gratitude, restraint, hospitality, sacrifice, renewal, liberation, and hope.

As part of this research phase, I hope to speak with religious leaders, cultural leaders, elders, artists, cooks, gardeners, florists, incense makers, chaplains, and tradition-bearers. These conversations will help me approach each observance with greater humility, accuracy, and care.

I am interested in questions such as:

• What fragrances, foods, flowers, herbs, spices, woods, resins, smoke, or oils are associated with this observance?

• Are these aromas official, regional, familial, personal, or symbolic?

• What emotional or spiritual tone does the observance carry?

• Are there fragrances or symbols that would feel inappropriate or misleading?

• What should an outsider understand before writing about this observance?

• Are there aspects of this tradition that should not be translated into an aromatic poem?

Conversations may help shape my understanding of an observance and may influence the language, tone, aromatic vocabulary, or ethical cautions used in the project. I will not quote, name, or attribute anyone without permission.

If you are willing to speak with me, I would be grateful for a 30–45 minute conversation, either in person or by phone. No preparation is required. I am simply interested in listening carefully.

To participate or ask a question, please contact me at andrew@drbonci.com