Field Notes — August 2026
Attention is the beginning of devotion. — Mary Oliver, Upstream, 2016
Watch what happens when you crush a juniper berry between two fingers.
The resin arrives all at once, sharp and bright, and for a second you are nowhere but here. Most of your senses don't need the world in front of them. Your mind can replay them on demand: you can hear a song in your head with no music playing, picture a face you haven't seen in years, walk through a room you grew up in. Smell is different. Try, right now, to smell rain in your head. Or beeswax, or wet sage. You can remember that the scent was there, and that you loved it, but the scent itself won't come. Smell can't be replayed. It only happens live: now, in this breath, in this body. It is the one sense with no past tense and no future tense.
I've been sitting with an old word lately, and it found me while I was foraging. I was up the canyon picking Rocky Mountain juniper, and the berries I wanted were just past comfortable reach: nose pressed into the branch, shoes feeling for their place on the slope, the day hot, the air full of juniper resin and the sage smell of big sagebrush nearby. (Big sagebrush, Artemisia tridentata, isn't a true sage. It smells like one anyway.) Foraging makes you pay attention whether you planned to or not. The tree, the ground, the heat, your own balance. And there I was, stretched full length toward a high branch, when the word surfaced.
Attend. It comes from Latin: ad-, toward, and tendere, to stretch. To attend is to stretch yourself toward something. On that slope, I was doing it literally. It's the same root that gives us tend, as in tending a fire or a garden, stretching your care toward something alive. The same root in tender. The attendant who is present for you. The attendance a teacher takes to find out who is actually in the room.
And it's the root under a phrase we use without thinking: we pay attention. We spend it. Somewhere in the bones of the language is the old knowledge that attention is finite, that it can be given or withheld, and that where we spend it is a kind of decision.
Most of a day's attention gets spent somewhere else. On the thing that already happened, or the thing that might. On a screen that is, by design, a window to anywhere but here. It's easy to move through a whole afternoon without once stretching out into the actual room you're standing in.
This is the quiet thing a NICER product is built to do. Not the active ingredients. The moment. You warm the oil between your palms and it releases, and for a second the scent puts you exactly where your body already is. The bitter bergamot, the warmth of cedar, the vanilla spice of benzoin resin, the light marzipan of plum kernel. A small roll call of presence. You're here. You showed up to your own afternoon.
I make these the way I do because of what happens next.
The thing in your hands came from somewhere you could point to on a map. The beeswax is from hives a beekeeper I know tends like family, foraging on wildflowers across the Wasatch. When you tell me you love the way one of our balms smells, you are telling me you love something those particular bees made, in that particular place. That travels back up the line and lands on them, and they are glad to know it. A jar of something from nowhere can't do that. The maker and the person never meet, and neither has to think about the other.
I formulate from what's actually here. Local botanicals, mineral salt from an ancient inland sea, beeswax from the mountains I live in. Three to nine ingredients in anything we make, each one backed by peer-reviewed science, nothing hidden. It's slower than the other way, and harder to scale, and I know that. But it makes something the other way can't: a product that is of a place, made for a place, with the help of people whose names I know. Connection to the moment. Community among the people sharing it. An economy that stays human-sized.
All of it comes back to that one old word. To attend is to stretch toward what is actually present. This breath, this skin, this canyon, these neighbors. Not the afternoon you already had. Not the one coming. This one.
The products are just an invitation. To be, for a moment, exactly where you are.
— James Birchler, Founder + Chief Scientist
NICER is luxury earthborn bodycare, handcrafted in small batches near Park City, Utah. Every formula is 3 to 9 ingredients, each validated by peer-reviewed science. We source organic, regenerative, and wildcrafted ingredients wherever possible, rooted in the botanicals and minerals of the landscape around us. Learn more at feelnicer.com.