There are three ways that I am aware making incense can work on us. The first is through using it—whether during prayer and meditation, ceremony, small daily rituals, or through memory and association as we use it to set a mood or change the feeling of a room.

The second is in the making as we come in contact with the materials—feeling their substance, smelling them in their raw form, and by the necessary repetitive movements of chopping, grinding into finer and finer pieces, sifting, mixing, kneading, and shaping.

The third is in our choosing of materials and what relationships they help us to develop and deepen. If we allow our attention to rest on our yards, on all of the plants we know and cherish or even take for granted, and look at them with fresh eyes asking if they want to become smoke we can’t help but become more and more of the place we inhabit. Then ever so gradually moving out from there to the fields and mountains—or prairies, desert, or coasts—that cradle our lives, and work with what presents itself we can’t help but be changed. We begin to embody our place. I’ve worked a little bit with exotics, enough to know the reasons for their popularity and to have fallen in love with the likes of copal and frankincense. Yet I find materials that grow where I grow to be most compelling, and this is true even living in the mid-Atlantic region which is not quite northerly enough to have ready access to larger volumes of varied conifer resins and not quite southerly enough to grow tropicals. These limitations force me to stretch my understanding of the function of different materials and yield personal blends that are more than their scent profile and are imbued with belonging and kinship.

Cultivating a local incense practice allows us to nestle in to the land we’re attached to, dig in deep to what sustains us, be moderate in our use because collecting takes time and care. It also brings us into conversation and relationship with people in new ways. When people know you’re immersed in and looking for fragrant materials they start to offer you their knowledge, plants, access to forage. Beautiful conversations happen that explode into excited chatter, get lost in tangents, trail off into deep and meaningful thought. For me this happens more readily and steadily when I surrender to it, when I no longer try to imagine how long it might take to gain some measure of mastery, stop worrying about how much time it might take to find a certain plant that’s caught my imagination, and let go of what the practice might cost in whatever currency I happen to feel lack most acutely in the moment. Most importantly, surrendering what any of it might mean. It’s a sometimes beautiful, sometimes maddening tension. In that surrendered space and silence there is room for mystery where we might find new ideas, experience new feelings and sensations, hear and sing new songs.

As with any practice, it’s tempting to think of it in terms of what we will learn about a topic and what it will allow us to produce in the outer world. That the movement of our practice will or should flow outward in a particular way as when we bring a product to market or make ourselves available in service to others. With time and practice the energy is also flowing inward, we are no longer learning about incense and herbs and smoke, we are learning from them. An herb will whisper to us, we’ll find breadcrumbs leading to unexpected places where kindred spirits reside and perhaps answers—to a problem we’ve encountered or an expectation that’s too firmly wedged in place. It’s that odd sort of dichotomy where we can drop out of the crush of society, out of our mental activity, into relationship and the relationship helps us drop further into the heart of kinship without ever having gone anywhere. Whether we feel that we are the clay in the potter’s hands, being guided by spirit(s), or simply in the flow and experiencing kismet or synchronicity, we have this depth of experience in common, and all share the ordinary beginnings of simply showing up. We are the sum of our practices and so much more.

Thank you, Lena and David Welker, for spending time and sharing generously your knowledge and insights. Our first visit was perfectly timed and I imagine I’ll understand more about that as time unfolds. It’s enough to say for now that your words and encouragement landed and were the key to unlock the gate that let these words flow.

Find out more about how they walk this earth and the classes they offer to help us all cultivate cooperation with nature at www.blueheronoutdoorschool.com.

Thanks also to Tyler Penor whose free video on Living Astrology provided the words for the distinction between learning about something and learning from it to better articulate my thoughts about the outward and inward flow of energy in practice. Check out his free Living Cosmology Mini-Course and his longer online offerings at thechironium.com.