The Spirit of Tea

"At the Intersection of Life and Tea" . . . "The Spirit of Tea" . . . one and the same. The longer phrase instantly became my motto as much as KTeas' motto when my husband first uttered it as the tagline appended to a proposed name for our someday tea business. I announced that whether we ultimately used the name he had just proposed or something else entirely, that phrase would be a our motto, because that expressed, for me, what Tea is all about, what it is I want to share and convey such that I even want us to have a tea business . . . The Spirit of Tea.

Naturally, we've been asked what brought us to become tea purveyors. The more immediate answer revolves around the cupboards full of teas that we always had. Some actual teas, some herbal tisanes, all tea bags---hey, everyone starts somewhere, right? We liked to offer tea to visitors. I was known as The Tealady for my Love of All Things Tea before having handles and usernames on the Internet became commonplace. Ironically, by the time I started using many of the apps and services that required a username, I discovered that "Tealady" was already taken, so I couldn't carry that title into the realm of the Internet.

Nonetheless, I have been Tealady. The Hospitality inherent in Tea appealed to me. The Ritual of Taking Tea called to me. My love of tea was not limited to the formal Afternoon Tea or Garden Party Tea, though I delighted in the concept. The Spirit of Tea seeped into The Everyday, and that, also, is part of what I love about tea. I would turn an afternoon of watching movies with the family into a tea party. (Shall I indicate how long ago this went on?: when we started doing this, those movies were on VHS!!!) I would take a tea party to family friends who had just had babies, whether or not their first, and couldn't get out of the house much in those first few weeks. I would have someone over for tea or take them tea if they were not well, whether with illness or sadness. And so on. I am Tealady.

Strangely, as I look back on my life to glean the origins of Tea's profound hold on my heart and soul . . . I find that I can only answer "I don't know." I don't know how or when it started or what started it. It just is. It simply seems as if it always has been.

True: my mother drank tea when I was a child. That is certainly how I was introduced to the beverage. My mother did not, however, have any special rituals or precious China tea sets that enchanted me as a child. She simply drank tea. That was the sum total of my exposure to tea, to begin with. Yet, tea grew to be more than simply a beverage to me, though the beverage can be special enough in itself when you have a really good cup of tea (whatever that may be for you). Somehow, sometime, to me, tea became Tea. The Currents of Life might have, upon occasion, caused me to drift away from the State of Being wherein Tea permeated my Life, but always, eventually, I drifted back to the Intersection of Life and Tea. Whether because I discovered a new friend had a tea set and loved to Take Tea, also, or when I experienced a little thrill the first time Captain Picard intoned, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."

When and where did it all start? I can't tell you. I can tell you, however, when I "got it". For all my love of All Things Tea throughout most of my Life---to the point that I can't remember when that love didn't exist though I know there must have been such a time---I still didn't fully grasp the power of Tea until one Sunday afternoon, oh, a decade-and-a-half-or-so ago, give or take a few years.

As I have said, "in the beginning" our teas were all grocery-store-bought tea bags. That is what we used for those afternoon movie-watching tea parties, and what I took in portable tea parties to others. At one point, a friend who knew we liked tea gave us a gift of a couple of Loose Teas from a special shop he'd run across in one specialized district or another where we lived at the time. Ooooooohh! We were entranced---and a bit overwhelmed, wary, intimidated. We weren't sure what to do with this odd, different form of tea. I think we already had a tea ball in our kitchen, acquired somewhere/when along the way, but we'd not had call to use it in who knew how long.

The exotic nature of this Loose Tea caused us to thank the gift-giver profusely and Put the Tea Away For a Special Occasion. We just didn't "get it" yet.

Time passed, as time does. We moved to another state. Movie rental became more common and as a family we frequently had afternoons or evenings devoted to watching a movie or two on VHS ::gasps::! The Sunday afternoons in particular lent themselves to those impromptu informal tea parties.

One Sunday---I cannot tell you the date and I cannot tell you why I thought of this on that particular Sunday---I suddenly recalled that Loose Tea we'd been given before we moved. I realized we had never had a special occasion that called for tea (or for which we had thought of the loose tea, at least) and so we still had not used that gifted tea. Bizarrely, I knew right where to find the tea and I knew precisely where the tea ball was. I decided that even though this was just an ordinary Sunday afternoon that we were going to spend watching movies, we would have that special Loose Tea, and I pulled down an old teapot of my mother's that was on display with our "good dishes".

What a wonderful tea party that turned out to be. It was the first time we had had black tea flavored with lychee. Delectable. Looking back, I cringe at the thought of how we packed far too much loose tea into that poor tiny tea ball. We probably didn't steep it the right amount of time. Nevertheless, we enjoyed that lychee black loose tea and we came away from that whole experience utterly delighted. It was as we cleaned up afterward and chattered about how special it had been that I "got it".

Despite my emphasis on Loose Tea, I'm not even saying it was the loose tea, itself, that worked the magic. After all, Ed and I are still searching for a loose black tea flavored with black currant that we like as much as the first black currant tea we ever had---in tea bags. This is not to say that we have not had any good black currant teas in our search. Indeed, we've had several very good ones and we carry a couple of them in our KTeas selection. But we still haven't found one that we like as much as that first, which we experienced in tea bags.

The Magic upon this occasion arose from the Approach. All that time, I had thought we needed to save that Loose Tea for A Special Occasion. On that Sunday, I realized that I had been looking at it Backwards, all that time. The Magic happened when we used the Loose Tea to make an Ordinary occasion, Extraordinary.

That was when I "got it". The Spirit of Tea . . . At the Intersection of Life and Tea.

'Til we raise our cuppas to each other again,