White Sage Resin

I spent a little bit of time this morning 'shucking' white sage stems gone to seed. What I was doing was removing the few leaves and cutting the bare stick (wand) leaving only the flowering end. All parts of this will be used somewhere -- the leaves, the sticks/wands, and the flowering heads.  By accident I discovered that the white sage shucking left a heavy resin on my cotton work gloves. It so reminded me of the stories I'd read about labdanum and how it is harvested with big rakes hung with strips of fabric to pick up the resin on the bushes. The 'ancient' way this was done was by scraping or pulling the bits of resin off of a shepherd's goats after they walked through the rock rose covered hillsides. That type of extract created a labdanum that had a hint of animal funk. Anyway, I digress. I scraped the resin off of my gloves and rolled a 1.5 gram ball of white sage resin that smells so intense, so deep and soulful. I'm thinking of performing some experiments with boiling the flowering heads to find out if I can get some resin to rise. Or maybe the stems. Probably both.