Blogs are such interesting artifacts of our past. Before my most recent post, the last post I had written on this blog was from 2019, a full five years ago. Interestingly, it was about the same thing that I wrote about last week: a trip to Japan. But that’s not really what inspired me to start writing on this blog again. It was a great source of photos and stories, sure, but the real reason was to highlight a change in how tea exists in my life.
When I worked for a teahouse, I developed a true passion for not just the taste of tea or its history and culture, but for the ritual of its preparation. I’ve written about this before, but in short: the way in which tea lends itself to the motions of being a physical practice is, for me, a tremendous way to bring mindfulness into my daily life.
As my routines have changed, a lot of that ritual has fallen away. I still made tea every day in the past five years but the emotional struggle of all that has happened in that time has taken away much of my enjoyment of it beyond the flavor of the liquid in my mouth. Between the horrors of police-enacted violence and the rise of the pandemic in 2020, my mother falling into dementia in 2023, and a slew of other personal struggles and tragedies that I’m sure are not unique, tea became just another task I completed every day. A way to stay barely connected to a distant joy that I had almost completely forgotten how to access.
I knew that I wanted to find a way to rekindle the dying embers of that fire, but I didn’t know how.
One thing that has really taken off in the last five years is the rise of the social media video. I used to post tea photos a lot on Instagram, but what I see there now is mostly video content, which is a medium I had never really explored.
My resistance to making video was mostly practical: where do you put the camera? How much do you record? How do you edit? And the big one: what can I do that is worth recording at all? All these other content creators seemed to be wizards.
But despite all those fears, I realized something unexpected. Making a video of preparing tea makes the experience into a presentation. And a presentation forces me to be truly present while performing it. Just knowing there’s a camera there recording something that I’m going to share with the world focuses my attention on the task in a way I just can’t do on my own. It made me realize that such presentations were an everyday occurance when I worked at a teahouse, so it makes sense that it was something I had lost.
So I started recording making my morning tea and posting it on Instagram as sort of a “moment of zen”. People liked it! But more importantly, I liked it!
I found myself really enjoying the practice again, from boiling the water and warming the cups all the way to the final sip. There’s even been an unexpected bonus: when I rewatch the videos I make, I get a second enjoyment because it’s like someone is making tea for me. The hand motions, the drip of water, the clink of a ceramic lid: it’s like a beautiful dance in miniature. I love it.
A friend pointed out that I might as well be posting those videos on my blog and not just on social media, and he was right. So here we go. I expect some of it will be without as much writing as I used to provide, but things evolve, right? I started this blog to share the excitement and joy I get from discussing and sharing tea, and this is just a new way to do that.
Today I’m drinking a 2007 Yiwu sheng puer. I have so much sheng hidden away that I really can’t remember where it came from but this is starting to have a nice age to it: warm camphor and sweet maple syrup over a bed of dry cedar. A good way to confront the height of summer.
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