Tag Archives: tea

Warm, Comforting Ritual

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Recently I shifted from coffee to tea. It’s part of a health issue but also, you know, I like tea. Jack and I have shifted three or four times between these two life-giving morning drinks over the course of our marriage.

Part of the health shift includes being a little more deliberate, a little more gentle, with food and time and intentions to adhere to schedules in the first place. Life in the slow lane is a good place to be, and tea is a way of being there in some surprising ways.

When you make coffee, it stays hot awhile and fresh awhile. Now some foodies will tell you that after about 45 minutes it’s not worth drinking, but most of us don’t mind, so long as it’s not scorched. Like gas station coffee that’s sat around all day. Coffee is largely forgiving. Heck, you can even throw in some ice cubes and drink it cold and be a hipster. It’s all good.

But tea, well, there is a ritual aspect to its preparation and a window to its taste. Jack sets up coffee the night before; flick the switch in the morning and it’s ready to roll.

Tea water has to be made in the kettle that morning. As it reaches boil, you pour a little into two vessels: the pot warmed and cleansed, the mug heated. Then you put the bags into the pot: one for each drinker, and one for the pot. Only then can you pour the rest of the hot water in. Put your cozy over the pot. Give it a few minutes. Too soon and you are drinking what my English friend calls pealy-wally rabbit piss tea. Wrong color, not near strong enough.

But if you forget and come back in twenty minutes or so, your tea is bitter, overbrewed, and worse, starting to cool.

I used to count stress days by how many reheating revolutions my coffee took in the microwave. A bad day was 5. Tea doesn’t play this kind of game. Drink it warm, or make it into iced tea, or waste it. Tea does not accept excuses. Once it’s in the pot, the clock starts.

Which is bemusing, because tea demanding this time makes the time protected, precious. This is when you have your devotions, play the morning word games online. Check your overnight phone messages, but don’t ANSWER them. Set up your strategy for the day. Sipping each cup, a little ritual inside a larger one.

Tea makes time by demanding it. Coffee will follow you anywhere, anytime. Tea demands loyalty and mindfulness.

I’m enjoying my morning tea rituals, and I’m learning to pay attention to the window of warm comfort opportunity in the pot. It’s all part of life in the slow-down lane.

The Monday Book: THE WAY OF TEA AND JUSTICE by Rev. Becca Stevens

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I picked this book up off the counter of my friend Randy’s bookstore Oracle Books. He looked vaguely discomfited and said, “OK but I wanted to read that so bring it back?”

It was returned Saturday. Normally we don’t do Monday books unless they are enthusiastically appreciated, or hated enough to evoke 400 words. Tea and Justice was kinda middling, in all honesty, like a cup of good tea that has cooled.

Its premise is exploring the history of tea tangled with terrible social injustices toward workers, women, how they were denigrated (and worse) in the name of profits. And explaining how Thistle Farms and its sister Magdelene program (helping women leave sex work and addiction) embedded got its tea room up and going even as it struggled to sustain existing businesses and services. The whole book reads something between insightful and advertising how hard Thistle Farms is working to help people.

Tea does have a violent history, which Stevens addresses in one of the chapters. It also has a snobby history, another chapter, and an intellectual history that overlaps with this snobbery. My favorite chapter was the one on the Inklings (Tolkein, Lewis et al) and mortality; drinking tea is lovely, but what will you do with your life as well, Stevens more or less asks.

My beef with the book is that it continually circles in a naval gazing way and tells all its stories one-person-removed. A difficult encounter with a potential funder appears in two chapters, the first time using his undrunk tea steeping into bitterness as an example. The second time, the story bordered on revenge for Thistle Farms, the women’s center on which I had hoped this book would be centered.

Thistle Farms and the Magdelene Center seem like wonderful programs, yet Stevens makes much of their mileage without telling too many stories from them. There are three or four stories from the women at the ends of each chapter, not so much woven in as tacked on. They are moving. They don’t feel integrated into the planning.

So there’s the dilemma. The book has some wonderful insights, but they slide past in a dreamlike fashion, buried under ever-circling spiritual comments and self-plumping of the farm and its work. The book was written more to raise profits and awareness than consciousness, methinks. Which is not a bad thing, given the work the farm does. It just wasn’t as enticing as it might have been. I feel bad giving it a lukewarm review.