About
Close Neighbors was named after the special relationship New Yorkers share through being in close proximity to one another. In cities, we live alongside thousands of people we may never get to know but share spaces and fleeting moments with.
Close Neighbors is an exploration of urban magic and the relationship between people and place.
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I'm a Filipina Czech American Folk witch with a background in anthropology and urban planning, and my oils are inspired by a curiosity of what it means to be a magical person.
Living in a city, I found it challenging to connect with nature. Much of my environment has been man made, designed for people to live within, crafted with ideas on how people should live inside it. This left me I feeling disconnected from nature-based spiritual practices rooted in natural landscapes, so I looked for magic within my actual surroundings.
How can we find agency within designed spaces? The city is full of spaces, systems, and expectations that shape how we move through the world, but living in a city also means constantly finding our own ways to live within them: how to navigate the systems, claim space for ourselves, find privacy, make connections and create meaning.
Each oil begins with a feeling, a place, or a phenomenon of city living. From there, it is developed and spelled through intuitive ritual with herbal, crystal, and planetary correspondences. Each oil is then meditated over, inspiring an original hand-painted watercolor label.
Close Neighbors is an ongoing exploration of urban folk magic and the idea at its center:
magic lives next door
hand-crafted somewhere in NYC, for wherever you call home
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