vanilla.
the subtle, the sublime, the alchemically connived. you are her.
Dark, pliant, moist. Slender sometimes, cherubic another.
She demands. The most labour-intensive of all the Earth’s bounty. The kind of arousing, enveloping sensorial luxury that ships were looted over.
There was a time when nobody could figure out how to grow vanilla outside of the only forest in the world where it bloomed, pollinated by the kiss of only and only one type of bee, darling little melipona.
A slowly climbing creeper, winding serpentine, always to her own tune. White orchids bloom from her, once a year. For one day.
On that blessed day, they are to be tended to, slowly, exquisitely, lusciously, for long hours, should you dream to relish their gift in the faraway future. The delicate pods that sprout from these flowers begin our journey to what is, in it’s natural form and authentic existence, an obscenely prized commodity, comparable in it’s demanding decadence only to India’s saffron.
Vanilla offers no dopamine, nor much gratification. Everything is a gamble with her.
A cruel mistress, sweet and soft spoken.
We came up with a million ways to approach, please, coax. Vanilla asks and takes arduous devotion, trials upon trials upon trials, to experience the possibility of her musky drip cascading upon our senses.
Hours and months of loving labour bring her to fruit, and then, she is cured under the sun. The warmth and consistency of months of ceaseless caresses from him lead her to mature into the hedonistic reward we desire. We were probably never meant to discover her. We were probably never meant to access her. It is incomprehensible how a human being, at some point in history, achieved the serendipitous first discovery of the formation of natural vanilla, because it smells like nothing for it’s entire delicate, ephemeral and fleeting life. The only feasible explanation is instructions whispered by the divine, revealed in a dream. Perhaps one of Aphrodite’s games. Perhaps Lalita Tripura Sundari’s swirling gift to Earth. The fact that human beings ever got to experience vanilla, at all, is the result of an intricate, labyrinthine, unbearably uncertain and mysterious riddling process of alchemical co-creation with Nature.
We desired vanilla so thirstily, sumptuous as she is, that we crafted and connived and crafted and connived.
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