Tea leaves: unlike wine, you can’t hoard it, I make that mistake all the time. As the level of a favourite tea falls in the cannister I slow down drinking it, by and by I stop altogether: for special occasions only. It is no good. The higher the quality of the leaves the more noticeable the degradation of flavour. The window for making it passes: the inevitable was not averted, the abstinence was for naught. You can lay up a case of wine; stored with care you might produce a treasured bottle years in the future for that celebration, that someone. Or make a gift of it. Everytime I want to gift a tea I can’t take something out of my collection, I have to go out tea-shopping anew. The truth is you have to be all the things I’m not to be a tea drinker: I’m clingy, I don’t like letting go of love, and I worry all the time about dwindling pleasure. Tea drinking forces you to enjoy a relationship while you have still have it, and it forces you not to try to prolong the relationship unnaturally, to accept all things come to an end. Drink it, enjoy it, cherish the moment, and when it is over be glad you had the yuan fen to encounter it. Hell, I’ve never learnt to do that with most of my men, let alone my tea leaves.A friend announced his resolution: to cut back on the coffee and to drink more tea. He wants to alter his life, be more leisurely, become more mindful (meditation is also on his list.) Tea is supposed to be calming, and isn’t tea-drinking about mindfulness? I agree to accompany him to choose leaves at the tea merchant. I do not say that tea has nothing to do with cultivating mindfulness. Oh, it takes patience and focus and skill to brew tea well; one can’t do it in the wrong frame of mind. (I once foolishly invited someone to have gongfucha on a first date and it nearly became my undoing. I was so jittery my hand shook throughout, and my mind being on my companion (decidedly handsome) I was unable to prepare tea with either the precision or concentration needed. Needless to say, I have never repeated this mistake. (First date locations; I still make bad tea distractedly.)) The tea you make is revealing of your inner state. But that is the point. Drinking tea has nothing to do with cultivating a mindset, it is not an exercise. Tea is the expression, the symptom of who you are, and the quality of the tea you brew is an objective correlative, the formulation and measure of your emotion. Tea is sensitive that way. But that is all. Tea doesn’t make you a different person, it is not gym equipment or meditation practice, nor is it a potion that soothes you. (I down mugs of poor teas when angry without noticing.) If it is mindfulness you are after you might just as well keep drinking your coffees but start paying attention to how you make it - hand dripping coffee, with its attentiveness to temperature and grounds and extraction times, seems to me every bit as complex and rigorous as tea making. Tea drinking doesn’t make you mindful, but a mindful person makes better tea. The more tea you drink the more you discover what kinds of tea you enjoy. The more tea you make the better you will become at making tea, that is all. The question of whether you can centre yourself to make good tea (or coffee, or execute a perfect pirouette, paint a picture, run a race….) is extrinsic to the act. The calm is in the maker not the tea.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird