Here's to tea and it's effects, bringing peace and calm to the world.
Just the idea of making tea for myself shifts my consciousness into a sort of dreamtime. Especially if I am alone, I know that I can now hang my mind up on a hook in the mud room and close the door behind me. The ritual has already begun.
Because I like to be intimately involved with every step of the process, I boil water in an open saucepan and I brew the leaves in a clear glass tumbler. This way can watch everything that's going on. I then decant through a gourd strainer into simple porcelain.
With this first sip, there is another shift. We make tea in an empty vessel and then we become an empty vessel to receive it. The practice of maintaining this emptiness runs through all of the world's mystical traditions. In the West, there is a prayer that says, "Lord make me decrease so that you might increase in me," but this "Lord" can be any "lord". The point is to get out of our own way and become a kind of receiver, a radar screen if you will, for whatever comes to us.
The ritual of making and tasting tea becomes what I call an "entry ritual", a doorway into other realms. My attention shifts to my pelvic floor, where the tea's warmth has settled. And this is where Thea, the goddess of light after whom tea was named, begins to illuminate my soul.
The sensation of light is that of mobilising forces, the feeling that new synapses are being formed. As an image, it is one I liken to moonbeams shining out from inside me. Things are clearer.
The Chinese say that tea "brightens the eyes" but this, like all things Chinese, can have several meanings. Sometimes tea brightens my entire perspective on the universe and my place within it. That is why I write of tea as an "entheogen", because it is a plant that affects my consciousness and my heart in a beneficent manner.
So there are these opening, flowering sensations in my heart: broad, expansive feelings of pure, unadulterated joy.
So where do we go from here?
Do I make myself another cup of tea?
No.
I just sit.
Perhaps I am not done with my tea. Perhaps all this is the result of a single sip. It's happened before. I peer down into a porcelain cup and, lo and behold, it's still full.
Tea is such a sensual experience. There's the handling and holding of warm vessels as we brew. There's that initial fragrance when we moisten the dry leaves with a few drops of water and bring it to our nose. There's that first sip, when our lips break the surface of our brew and our whole body fills with the essence of the leaf. With the first taste we encounter the silken viscosity, the floral notes and fruity tones, the earthen depths, wooded bite and all of it bathing our tongues with waves of unfolding complexity before it slides down the back of our throats. I muse that it might be more accurate to say "waves of cascading epiphanies" for such is the way it feels when Thea shares with us her deepest mysteries and stirs us to our souls.
And so she stirs. And she mobilises. Tea tastes good in my mouth and feels good in my body. It lifts my spirits and opens my heart. What more could we ask of a friend?
I have landed in my body. If I'm lucky, I can hang out here for a while in this peace and calm, for that is what it finally ends up being, and that is why tea has been grown on monastic properties for a thousand years. It brings us to a place of wakeful tranquility. I call it reverie
Perhaps it is that tea pulls me back so far into myself that my senses become attuned to a different set of coordinates. Perhaps my senses align themselves with a subtle, more refined resonance. Someone once said that tea muffles strident noises. It certainly seems this way to me, but then, I have never been known for my powers of deductive reasoning. I would prefer to lay down under tea bushes on the green, terraced hills of Yunnan...and dream.
By Frank Hadley Murphy
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