I cannot deny it: I have become somewhat of an incense fiend. I am completely addicted to the warm, sweet-smelling odour that permeates my home and greets my senses when i walk in the door. It’s a cozy, homey smell that you can’t get from nauseating glade plug-ins, or, God forbid, Febreze. It’s punchy, but not overpowering, and I love the old world spiritual significance that it has too.
I talked about my (re)discovery of incense in this article, so I won’t repeat myself here, but I will say that since that time I have a hard time resisting checking out any store that looks as though it might sell some incense…
It was sort of a happy accident that the first incense I bought was the really good quality stuff. If the inn I was working at didn’t burn the nag champa made by India’s Shrinivas Sugandhalya company, I might just as easily have bought some crappy American made stuff. Then again, if they were burning crappy American made stuff I probably wouldn’t have ever taken a liking to it…
I’m the sort of guy that likes to try new things, and when I find something new that I like, I tend to try it as many ways as possible. So naturally I wanted to try more incense, and having tried nearly everything appealing the little new age store here has to offer, I decided to head on over to Google. One of the first results on Google caught my attention. it was the online store of a vendor I remembered seeing at the local flee-market my dad used to drag me to as a kid. I won’t say her name, but it rhyme’s with banana’s incense, which is one of the scents she makes. (Oh by the way, the fact that she makes a banana scent should have been a red flag since it can only be made by artificial means, but curiosity killed the cat, right?) I hemmed and hawed about placing an order for this “hand-dipped fresh incense”, and ultimately decided not to order it because as it happened I was soon to be passing through the town where her retail store is on a road trip and decided to stop in then.