On the many strange occurrences that can happen in one day – or a few more than one!

I have learned over the course of a few years and more experience than I even want to remember not to expect too much from Mondays. Mondays are supposedly the days for New Beginnings, fresh starts, new opportunities to create, to do, to go.

I’ve learned better. Mondays, so my reasoning goes, are the days where I can look at a long and endless desert of days before that TGIF moment early Friday morning – that no matter what transpires today, it’s Friday, so how bad can it be?

Today was, all things being equal, not that kind of Monday. Today was a Monday – a humdrum, gray, overcast day, the last in the month of February, that completely blew me away.

Today, I sat down with a professional in my field for a discussion on What To Do With Tarleisio. We went through my online portfolio, discussed a few changes to implement here and there, and she critiqued a few items – good, bad, and spectacular.

The good news is – it’s fabulously not bad! The bad news is…I should be doing something else entirely. And she had some most excellent ideas about that, too. Starting with…

My passion for perfume, my passion for writing, and my passion for this blog.

It just so happens I’m a born communicator. I was fired up today, fired up about possibilities and things that could happen, feeling that breathless kind of ease that comes with being with someone who knows what you’re talking about. I think it helped too I was wearing a heady cloud of Incense Extrème, just in case I needed my stainless steel armor, and that she liked it very much indeed.

We spent quite a bit of time discussing this blog, discussing how it has evolved from my little tongue-in-cheek joke to something that amazes me every single day. I now have nineteen followers. Nineteen is not a huge number, but consider this…a recent study showed over one billion blogs in existence. The vast majority of those die an unnoted death after a while when those bloggers give up the ghost and the thrill of…writing for an audience of one. Of those left – about 1.5 million are updated more than once a month. This includes yours truly. Which means, put another way, that roughly one out of a thousand – give or take my craptacular math – blogs make it through their “audience of one” phase and on to gain a regular readership. Not a few of those are commercially marketed, with clickable ads and so on.

Not this one. I had not one reader when I started. A very loyal, steadfast friend became my first. I commented on other blogs, kept posting as often as I could, kept commenting. I promoted it on Facebook. I began a correspondence with several regulars and have made a point of replying to every comment I get. I gained more followers. And so it went…Along the way, I suspect I turned not a few of you on to Doc Elly, an independent perfumer so far under the radar – and far lower than she certainly deserves with that kind of talent – almost no one had heard of her. I think a few have by now, and I just know even more will!

If something’s good, if something catches my fancy and fires my imagination, if you give me an eighth of an inch, I will happily run with it and shout it from the virtual rooftops of my own imagination:

“Listen up, people! This is great! This is amazing!”

In whatever way I can.

As Ines of All I Am A Redhead reminded me on her own blog today, and Suzanne of Suzanne’s Perfume Journal did even more, quite possibly the best thing to happen was the faith I’ve had restored in…humanity in general. Perfumistas, perfumoholics, whatever you choose to call us – are some of the greatest people on Planet Earth. We anticipate the arrival of the mailman much more than we ever did before the Perfume Bug bit us where it hurt. We are introduced to worlds, horizons, places and experiences we would never know if not for perfume. We can rant, rave and commiserate over the state of the perfumosphere and the pretentions of marketing. And above all else, we can share our common passion with a vengeance – and connect with those out there, just like us.

For making that possible, for restoring my own faith in humanity, for reading and commenting and commenting back on my own sometimes inane comments, for accepting me as one of your own and asking about me when I was hit by the flu recently – I can thank you the only way I know. Through this blog, that tried to communicate the principle of “share the love”

Because we do, because we love what we do, because we breathe and sniff and exude and share, magic happens. Opportunities arise, the kind of opportunities some among us – that would be me – could never have begun to imagine on a July night during an attack of the “wtf…I’ll create a perfume blog!”

The kind of opportunity that can strike, at any time, at any place, and even on a Monday. Watch this space! I’ll keep you posted!

Image: “Serendipity” by Josephine Wall, 2007.