How-To: 문 (Moon) Incense Powder
Gallery
We live in a world where visual culture is lionized, which creates a hierarchy that skews narrow, limited, and exclusionary. Perhaps entire universes stand to be revealed if we allow other distillations to be brought forward and prioritized.
Throughout history, a myriad of cultures have been shaped by making scent rituals. Fire’s interplay with Earthly materials: resins, herbs, and plant life marking time and bearing witness to the sacredness of one's life and the multitudes and possibilities it contains.
Scent is slow, embodied, and generously allows you to come back to yourself. Blocked, stifled, stagnant, restricted - all words we use to convey overwhelm, frustration, and uncertainty. We’re rewarded for reactionary, impulsive, and binary thinking. Scent can aid us in pushing back on quick fixes, hurried deadlines, and a false sense of urgency.
It creates an opening for context and the study of relationality to your environment and encourages deep exploration. Scent creates an immersive opening for subtleties that can transcend fixed planes and collapse time because of its interplay with memory. Building our own worlds and extending them towards the unconstrained facets it helps illuminate is not just possible but may be necessary in fully understanding the contours of life.
We hustle, contort, and grind ourselves down in order to produce, but rarely create. Creating requires space, slowness, and breath; a confluence that reveals a liminal window sought for expansive meaning. What appears to be elusive can be transmuted by employing different modalities of inquiry that are intentionally rooted.
Shaky and sputtering, we search for the intersection where nothingness dovetails into limitlessness. Piercing the edge of what we know as consciousness, verdant landscapes cascade and ripple out. We’re all in pursuit of a wellspring for regeneration. Look toward the pleasure of ephemerality instead of seeking confirmation within hardness. What becomes of the power held within constructions after we edge closer to the unknown and defiantly free fall?
Both presence and time continue to be our rarest and most valued currency. Locating ourselves within the noise is crucial. We decide how we move through time and space because of a collective history. Intention and care echoes through the unfurling swirls of smoke, ascending upwards to infinity.
문 (Moon) was created by Transmissions author, Se Young Au, as a transportive scent; a portal or door to clear pathways for creative reflection and renewal.
To ensure a soft, lingering aroma, we recommend burning 문 (Moon) on a mica plate to control and diffuse the burn.
- Place tealight inside charcoal burner to light.
- Lay charcoal on top of the wire lid and align with the flame.
- Once the charcoal is fully lit, carefully remove using metal tongs.
- Take out the tealight and transfer the lit charcoal to inside of the burner.
- Carefully place charcoal vertically inside the burner.
- Position a mica plate on top of the wire lid above the charcoal.
- Use a small spoon to place incense powder on top of the plate, adjusting the quantity to fit your preferred intensity or burn time.
