Mountain Breath Incense Sticks | Tian Gou

The beast that always knew which way the air was moving.

High in the western mountains of old China, the classic texts describe a creature called the Tian Gou. It looks like a wildcat with a white head, and its cry sounds like "liu liu," a clear note that carries through fog. The people who shared those mountains believed its senses reached where ours can't, that it always knew which path was open and which air was worth breathing. The books say it warded off misfortune. The mountain people just knew: where the white-headed one walks, the haze lifts.

Handmade of botanicals, such as cliff cypress, chuan bei fritillary bulb, solomon's seal, lily bulb and figwort root, Tian Gou incense is designed for mornings that feel heavy before they've even started, evoking the feeling of standing among distant peaks and bamboo forests after rainfall. Our formula of Tian Gou incense is gentle enough specially to soothe allergic rhinitis, unblock stuffy noses, and warm fragile lung qi for all-season defense.

You know those weeks.

It starts around the time the trees turn. The windows close, the heat kicks on, and the apartment goes into its sealed-up season. The air gets dry and close and faintly stale, the kind of atmosphere that makes 7 a.m. feel like it's already behind schedule. You wake up, and the room is the same as at midnight, and nothing about it says begin again. Or it's spring, and everything outside is yellow with pollen, and you keep the windows shut and the air inside goes flat instead. Either way, the room isn't wrong. It's just heavy. 

You can't change the season. You can change what the first ten minutes of your morning feel like. That's an older idea than you'd think, and it starts the way most Chinese rituals do: with one stick, one match, and a small deliberate act that says this day gets to start over.

• Key botanical ingredients: Cypress Wood, Fritillaria, Polygonatum, Lily Bulb, Scrophularia
  
• Dimensions: Box of 120 incense sticks. (Approx. 40 minutes burn time per stick)

The menthol jar goes on your chest in the bedroom.
Somebody rubbed it on your chest, and the whole room smelled like it by morning, and it worked, and you slept. There're the neti pot people, or the HEPA filters, or any of the sensible things people do in the sealed-up season, but none of them give the morning a shape. A jar on your chest is a response to something already wrong. A ritual at the window is a way of starting the day on your own terms, before anything goes wrong at all.

That's the difference between a remedy and a habit. Remedies are for when you're already down. Habits are for the ninety percent of mornings that are just heavy, and just need something that says begin again.