About

How the wood got here

There is a workshop in Taipei that has been a family business since the 1970s. It began as a jewelry shop and moved into trading stones. A shipment of palo santo arrived from Colombia in 1989, and at the end of that year a gathering was commissioned in Peru.

It took months. Fallen wood has to be found and gathered. The container reached Taiwan the following spring, and that is what these pieces are made of.

The wood

Palo santo is gathered from trees and branches that have fallen and died on their own, which is also where the most fragrant wood comes from. Peru's regulations permit nothing else to be collected.

So no tree is cut for any of our products. Ours was gathered in Peru between 1989 and 1995, and it has been aging in Taiwan ever since.

A great deal of the palo santo on the market is what is left after the oil has been distilled out of it for perfume. The wood gets sold on afterwards, which is why so much of it smells faint.

This is where we are different. No oil has been taken out of ours.

How the pieces are made

They are carved on computer-guided machines and marked with a laser. Our precision is not a compromise. It is the reason the rings on a pendulum are exact, an amulet is the same thickness front and back, and every Karnak is the same Karnak.

Artisanal palo santo processing would give you charm, and a lot of variation. This is not what we do.

Thirty years of aging, and one chance to get it right. Precision is how we honor that.

The incense

Made the way incense has been made in our part of the world for a long time: wood ground to fine powder, bark from trees of the Phoebe genus as a binder, and water, formed and dried in the sun. No perfume, no oils, no enhancers. South American material worked by an Eastern craft.

The workshop also supplies the wood for Palo Santo Eastern Co. incense. That is why you will find that brand on the incense boxes.

The name

Ki (氣) means breath, and by extension the life in a living thing. The word is old and it is shared across several languages in the part of the world where these pieces are made.

What changed

The pieces used to be called Protection, Abundance and Manifestation. They are now Steadiness, Becoming and Presence.

The old names pointed at outcomes. Not promises exactly, more the thing being hoped for. What we noticed over five years is that people were not reaching for these pieces at the peak moments, when something finally landed. They were holding them in the middle of ordinary, daily life: in the waiting room, in a closed hand before a big meeting, in cars, and bras, and under pillows when wishes were whispered and nobody else was there to witness it.

So the names moved to describe that instead. Lived, rather than prescribed.