Information, product discussion and random musings from the staff of Shoyeido Japanese Incense, Boulder, Colorado division. Please visit Shoyeido's online store to view our complete product line.
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About 20 miles northwest of Beijing lies Xiangshan - "Fragrant Mountain Park." This ancient, beautiful area derives its name from incense burner-shaped Xianglu Peak. The mountain's frequent mists are said to complete the feeling of an enormous incense burner wreathed in aromatic smoke.
Xianshan is also legendary for its intensely red autumnal displays. Each year, the many maple, sumac, persimmon and smoke trees cloaking the hills are said to burst into brilliant crimson.
Robots. Is there anything they can't do?
It's The Incense Smoking Robot, available from General Robots.
At the Thien Vuong Co Sat Pagoda in Dalat, Vietnam ("The City of Thousands of Flowers") can be found three Buddhas statues carved of aloeswood (the aromatic wood found in the finest Japanese incense). Each figure reportedly stands about 4 meters tall and weighs 1.5 tons. Impressive!
The brutally cold conditions many of us are experiencing can result in much higher heating bills. There's a lot of winter weather still to come, and if you didn't winterize your home before the current deep freeze, you can still get it done ... and enjoy some lovely Shoyeido incense while you're at it.
Locate any invisible incursions of cold outside air by holding a lit stick of incense along the edges of door frames, baseboards, and windows. The flow of smoke from the incense stick should clearly indicate where - and to what degree - Old Man Winter is invading your space.
Those lovely swirls of incense smoke aren't just eye candy - put them to work for you!
Weather stripping, caulk, and plastic film are some of the ways to address this particular issue. For more info on conserving energy and reducing your heating costs, visit the U.S> Department of Energy's Energy Savers Blog.
We recently updated the look of our Boulder lobby/incense showroom with a flock of spiffy new Japanese paper lanterns, new framed art and some comfy seating. A few pictures of our makeover:
The lanterns are especially atmospheric after sunset.
Have a seat and enjoy the melange of subtle incense fragrances permeating our lobby while you're waiting for your order!
Just in time for Christmas comes a new study suggesting that myrhh, the fragrant resinous material of several Middle Eastern and Ethiopian trees, may act to lower levels of harmful cholesterol and thus improve heart health. It would presumably need to be administered internally for the health benefit to occur. As of this blog post, myrhh chewables have not yet been invented.
An abstract of the study in question can be found here; a more lay-friendly recounting is here.
What does raw myrhh even look like, you may wonder? Turns out it's as nondescript in appearance as it is wonderfully fragrant:
If all this murmuring about myrhh has you hankering to partake of this singular fragrance, Shoyeido offers an incense with prominent myrhh notes; we've named this blend, appropriately enough, "Peace."
At the risk of overstating the obvious, 2009 has been a wild year, hasn't it? For many, it's a year that simply can't come to its natural conclusion soon enough. Historic, depressing, scary, hopeful ... it has surely been a year of extremes for the inhabitants of planet Earth.
We'd like to thank everyone who helped to carry us through our own trying times. To our many blog readers, Facebook fans, newsletter subscribers, contest entrants, retail stores, direct customers, friends, families, coworkers, and well-wishers, we'd like you to know how very much we appreciate you! We hope that, in some small way, our incense products have helped to calm and sustain you during your own stressful moments.
Looking ahead to 2010, we have lots of big changes in store ... a new product line or two to announce, new contests for cool stuff, and bunches more plans that we just aren't ready to talk about yet! Please stay tuned, because we promise that you'll be the first to know.
Stay safe out there!
The fabled Incense Road, the ancient aromatics trade route that stretched between India and the Mediterranean (and with many way-points throughout the Arabian peninsula), has long been shrouded in mystery. Yet as new discoveries are made, greater insight is gained into the millennia-old "life and times" of this dusty overland route.
One new insight was announced earlier this month by Israeli archeologists studying geopolitical boundaries of more than 2,000 years ago along the Mediterranean segment of the Incense Road. Their findings indicate that peoples of the time used the road as a means of establishing control over the nearby Negev desert lands.
According to the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA), the Hasmoneans (the 100-year-old dynasty of an independent Jewish state known as the Hasmonean Kingdom of Israel) built a fortress, called Horvat Ma'agurah, along the Incense Road between Petra (seen below) and Gaza. The purpose of this fortress is believed to have been a means by which the Hasmoneans could keep its enemies out of Negev.
Petra
The peoples most adversely affected by this measure were the Nabateans, an oasis-dwelling Arabic people who preferred the myrhh, frankincense and spice trades to their more agriculturally inclined neighbors. The Nabateans' own contributions to history are great: their invention of a North Arabic script would eventually became Modern Arabic script.
If you are an enthusiast for history, maps, incense and textiles, or some intersection thereof, this all makes for very illuminating and entertaining reading. Click any of the links above to learn more about this aspect of the Incense Road and for additional details about the IAA's findings. The Nabatean site is especially rich with images and documents, and even provides details about that other storied aromatics trade route, the Incense Sea Route.
A friend of ours recently snapped this amazing nighttime image in his local (Colorado) backyard, and has given us permission to share it here. Notice the baby raccoon, shyly peering around the lower-left tree trunk:
Our friends in the Healthy Living Dept. of the Central Market in San Antonio, TX have been using the colorful packaging of Shoyeido's Jewel Series incense as Christmas tree ornaments. We love it ... we just wish we'd thought of it first!
Hey, is that a bunny rabbit? Look at that cute little fluffy bunny rabbit in the tree!
It's a snowy day here in Boulder - the snowiest October day since 1997. Here's the scene around our offices today.
The entrance to our lot:
Jeff, our general manager, snaps a few pictures of the wintry scene:
This tree shed its leaves just in time to become an intricate snow sculpture:
It's contest time once again!
In June, we gave away a nifty kneaded incense-making kit. The prize this time is different, but no less hip: a gorgeous, artsy, oversized 2010 "Year of the Tiger" Zen calligraphy calendar!
For instructions on entering, simply subscribe to our monthly, free e-newsletter, The Scentinel - full contest details will be included in the very next edition. Please subscribe promptly, because that very next edition comes out this Friday afternoon, Oct. 9.
There are three ways to sign up for our newsletter: 1) if you're currently on our blog, www.makingscentsblog.com, look for a link in the left-hand margins; 2) if you're on our Facebook wall, notice an e-newsletter tab at the top of the page; 3) our online store, www.shoyeido.com, contains a subscribe link a little ways down the home page.
(If you'd previously subscribed to The Scentinel, rest easy. Unless you unsubscribed at any point, you're set to receive Friday's new issue).
If you're uncertain about signing up for our monthly e-newsletter, just remember that it's free, that you can easily unsubscribe at any time by clicking the links contained in each issue, and that we will never share your email address with anyone else, ever.
Once you receive Friday's Scentinel, read the article therein on how to enter our contest for this lovely calendar. Thanks, and good luck!
We're a bit late with our August 2009 Best Sellers list - okay, a lot late - so don't be surprised to see September's list popping into this space in a few days.
Relative sales of our most popular incenses remained quite stable from July, the main exception being fennel and clove-scented Emerald "Awareness", which sneaked onto the list by knocking the 10-Stick Daily Incense Assortment out of the No. 10 position.
1. Moss Garden (Nokiba)
2. Kyoto Autumn Leaves (Kyo-Nishiki)
3. Eternal Treasure (Hoyei-Koh)
4. Amethyst
5. Diamond
6. Golden Pavilion (Kin-Kaku)
7. Ruby
8. Great Origin (Daigen-Koh)
9. Kyoto Cherry Blossoms (Kyo-Zakura)
9. Emerald
One of the most intriguing plants that grows wild in our area is variety of ground cherry. It has uninspiring flowers earlier in the summer, but then it develops these interesting pods, each of which contains a little fruit about half an inch in diameter.
In a few weeks, these pods will be completely dried out into papery translucent lantern shapes. They remind me of the lanterns in this photo of the Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto, taken by photographer Ad Blankestijn.
Our good friend Mary Burnett De Gomez, proprietor of lovely Hanayagi: The Japanese Garden and member of event sponsor the Japanese American Citizens League expects a large turnout and gorgeous fall weather. Truly, there's no place more stunning than scenic northern New Mexico in autumn.
The event is being held this Sunday, Sept 27 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, 1701 4th Street SW. Parking is free and admission is only $3, with proceeds going toward the creation of a proposed local Japanese Cultural Center.
Here in the arid West, water is highly valued. Although not quite as expensive as gold, it is certainly very important to us, being much more useful.
