Text Box: Simple Things... While visiting the Su Ba, Katherine and I stumbled across a lean-to hut behind the main buildings of the compound. There I found a woman with a bandanna tied across her face, sitting on a stool and bent over a low table. On the table before her was a heaping clay-looking mountain that turned out to be sandalwood paste. She would pick up a stick with her left hand from a large pile, make a snake-roll from the paste with her right, and roll the paste around the stick. “So THAT’S how they do it!” She would complete several sticks a minute, and sat there all day making about seventy-five cents to a dollar a day rolling incense. Once on the stick, though, the incense needs to dry in the sun, and I saw an entire patio covered with these artful fans of incense drying. All through my travels, it was the simple things like this that caught my attention and stopped me for a mindful moment.

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