Bi Fang Incense Sticks | Grounding Earth

The bird summer couldn't put out.

In Shan Hai Jing, there's a bird called the Bi Fang. It looks like a crane with one leg, a white beak, and red markings over green-blue feathers, and it calls its own name. The book writes Bi Fang carried the flame wherever it appeared. Not even the wettest part of the year.

With a classical Chinese herbal blend of red sandalwood, clove, red poria and Chinese pepper, Bi Fang Incense is designed for the humid weeks when the apartment feels like it's holding its breath, helping create a feeling of stability and connection, which dispels dampness to relieve heaviness in the body, and sticky stools. Designed for mindful mornings, creative work, and moments when you want to feel centered and rooted.

You know this part of the summer.

August, and the air outside is wet enough to chew. Inside, the office AC is set to meat-locker, so you sit all day in a light sweater in July, drinking an iced coffee to stay awake in the cold. By the time you get home the apartment is the same temperature, which is to say: damp, dim, and faintly like a cave. The sheets feel clammy when you slide into bed. The towel you hung up last night still smells faintly off by morning. The gym bag by the door is starting to be a problem. The evening sits on you instead of lifting off you.

It isn't the heat that gets to people in this stretch of the year. It's the heaviness. The sense that the whole season is slightly waterlogged, and you along with it, and no amount of cold drinks fixes that because cold drinks are how you got here.

Old Chinese folks had a different instinct about these weeks. A small deliberate amount of warmth: a clove-scented room, a dry woody smoke, an evening that ends warm instead of chilled. That's the instinct we rolled into this incense stick.

What's it smell like?

Nobody agrees on how to describe a smell. Then we invited four people, Queenie (customer service team), Kai (herbal grower), Michael (aroma evaluator) and Ann (neighbor of workshop), to share their feelings especially whatever showed up in their heads.

Queenie: Feel like stepping out onto wild grass at dusk. Fresh and a little sweet.

Kai: Sit at an old wooden table with a casual book.

Michael: The last sunlight fades, gentle warmth around me.

Ann: Wandering along a field edge at dusk, the air feels lighter.

Why I made this one?

I grew up around incense and I'm the 5th-gen. What I have never done is watch an American smell it for the first time. That sounds like a small thing. It is not, because almost everything I could tell you about Panda Incense is something you have no way to check.

There is a good reason to be careful with incense. A lot of what leaves China is a thin stick dipped in fragrance oil and dried. It smells loud for two minutes, and then the room smells like a hotel lobby. In a photograph, a one dollar box and a hundred dollar box look the same. So the fair question is the one you are already asking. How would I know what I’m getting, and what’s really in it?

Here is what I can put on the table. All our incense are made from pure herbs, ground to powder and pressed with a plant- based binder. No fragrance oil, no accelerates, and clean burn with low smoke.

I still do not know whether that is something people here want. And this is the part I am still learning. I have made incense my whole life and I have never had to explain it to someone who did not grow up around it. What a plant binder is, why a stick should not have a charcoal core, how much important a formula is. Those things are invisible in a photograph, but I think it is visible in a smell and your status can tell you.

So if you are not sure, write to us before you buy. I would rather answer twenty questions than have a box sit on your shelf unlit.

• Key ingredients: Sandalwood, Poria, Clove
• Dimensions: Box of 120 incense sticks. (Approx. 40 minutes burn time per stick)
• Best For: Morning rituals, focused work, creative sessions, tea ceremonies