Moving Forward

The second book in my series, “Fit Company for Oneself,” has 28 chapters. This week I put the eighth chapter up as a Google document where my “early readers” can get at it, teasing it out of many half-formed ideas onto the page. Once again, it doesn’t feel like writing. It feels like I’m sitting with the work, listening, opening myself to what it can tell me. When I begin, I know what I need from a chapter, what I want to work with, but I leave it wide open, inviting in what comes. “Writing,” working with sentences one at a time, comes later.

This openness happens whether I’m in front of a blank page or not. While I’m doing the dishes or on my way to the market, things that are important to a chapter surface. It means that nothing is ever finished, that it can always be made better, of course. But somewhere along the line, it takes form. Last year’s work on “The Pastor’s Kids” is currently gestating. It will get another vigorous edit in August and September this year, based on the comments its readers give me, before I finally try to find an agent to assist in its publication.

My sister Solveig said to me, in a recent phone call, “I didn’t feel little when I was little, and now I don’t feel old.” I certainly have that feeling as well. The nub of our selves which we are given to work with doesn’t change much. That bit of consciousness of our selves gets more comfortable, adapts to situations and makes itself a home somewhere, interpenetrating the consciousness of “others” around us as we grow older.

But as kids we know a lot more than we can express. We watch things happening around us and wonder about them, often having only part of a picture that will sharpen later. Our understanding of the reality around us must ripen, in some cases become fruit. The questions and wonderings raised by the times we live in, the experiences we go through, the culture that surrounds us become the work of our lives. Doing this work, finding the meaning in our lives makes us into grownups.

Line, Marty and Paul Mikkelson must leave what Auden called the “closed society of tradition and inheritance” for “the open society of fashion and choice,” one hundred years after Poe and Baudelaire, in whom Auden first discerned the Modern Age. It took that long for it to penetrate the pocket of Scandinavia in the Midwest, wrapped in cotton wool like an old-fashioned Christmas ornament, where the Mikkelsons grow up. The material elements of their lives are shared with post-WWII Americans everywhere, but the culture, tradition and inherited values came direct from an earlier century.

The transition for my characters happens in about 1966, in this book, “Fit Company for Oneself”. Line, Marty and Paul make the leap each in their own way, though it is many years before the painful change is assimilated. Born close in age, in 1944 thru 1948, they are dragged into the Twentieth century in the turbulent wake of their peers. It is not insignificant to their development, however, that they come from whole cloth. An intact nuclear family, a large extended family, a religious and intellectual culture which, though torn and much patched, retains its value and usability. Throughout their lives, the Mikkelsons can reach back and feel its sustenance as they move steadily forward.

Tea

“I thought this was a blog about writing,” you say. “What’s all this about tea?”

But does anything really get done without tea? Or, in your case perhaps, coffee? I have a simple tea ritual, which goes on throughout the day, using oolong tea during the week and a smoky lapsang souchong on weekends. I pour boiling water into two teapots, dump it out and then put the day’s tealeaves into one of the pots. Then pouring just boiling water over the leaves, I quickly strain the brewed tea into the second pot, allowing the water to sit on the leaves less than 30 seconds for oolong and less than a minute for lapsang souchong. Stewed tea very quickly gets bitter, and we have found this quick brewing gives us the flavors we like.

We drink tea out of tiny Chinese porcelain cups, pouring more as we drink it so the tea is always hot. Don likes cooled tea and we save anything that we don’t drink for him to drink later. But I only like it hot.

The weekday tea is an oolong, fermented under the sun. I’m not sure of its exact provenance, but we buy it in bulk from Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco and it bears the responsibility for the health benefits I expect from green tea. Our first brewing is for breakfast, but the same tealeaves with the water poured off them, sit all day in a teapot. During the day I heat more water and pour it over these same leaves, having understood from my sister Naomi’s naturopath partner, Priscilla Skerry, that as you re-use tea leaves, caffeine lessens and the polyphenols necessary to health increase.

On weekends, we use a black lapsang souchong tea. Norwegians like smoky tasting things, fish, cheese, toast and tea! The leaves of lapsang souchong are smoke-dried over a fire. I’ve been drinking lapsang souchong for many years, purchasing it in Chinatown, or again, at Rainbow Grocery. The caffeine is a bit strong, so I only use it on weekends. Thankfully, Don likes everything and never insists on one or other. He drinks whatever is in front of him with gratefulness, letting me be the tea mistress.

Tea is perhaps best shared, but it goes well with everything! Friends, cookies, a good book, your journal. Few things are not enhanced by the addition of a good cup of tea!

The literature regarding tea is vast and I cannot hope to add to it. But one of the questions for my work is where, precisely, do body, mind and heart meet? To many philosophical questions in the Buddhist tradition, the reply is “Have a cup of tea”! As John Blofeld, a renowned writer on Eastern traditions says, this means “There is no possible way of dealing with your question in words, but the Way is all around and within you, for you to experience by direct perception.” It may be that to my question too, there is no better answer than a cup of tea.