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.