Stages Of Growing Up Through The Example Of Interaction With A Mug Of Tea

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Stage one - I sit and talk about the taste of tea, about the beauty of a mug, about what mugs are in Africa, about which ones were three hundred years ago, and which ones in the Stone Ages, about what a rare and unique mug I saw from a friend, about who made this mug, about how the tea was grown and harvested on the plantation in all the smallest details and subtleties, about how it was fermented. Here I am first-rate aware of both mugs and tea - everything. I sit and reason. The main thing for me is stories and awareness. The main thing is the circle, its history. The tea remained intact.

Stage two. I taste tea. And immediately I immediately start to remember and compare where I tried which tea, which tea with which flavor, which one is better / which is worse - I compare, I like it. The tea is drunk, but in the mouth instead of the taste of tea there is a taste of comparisons, and at the same time, a feeling of unsaturation, shallowness, insufficiency, and smallness of the tea taste. It seems that I drank tea, but it seems that I didn’t. Here, for the first time, I try to let go of the importance of the mug, I taste the tea itself, but the importance of the stories about the mug and about the tea is still deep, and is emerging quite actively.

The next stage is - I'm going to China or Ceylon (this is a metaphor, but the essence is exactly that). In Ceylon, I learn to collect tea, touch it with my hands, work day and night on the plantation and periodically, in between, I manage to steal a couple of minutes to drink tea. I drink it from any of the cheapest containers, even from a cut from a plastic bottle, and suddenly it turns out that I have never tasted tea with a taste of such depth before that moment. All previous tea drinking fades against this background. What's the matter, why exactly this: why with dirty hands and from a plastic glass tea turned out to be the most delicious is still not clear, but here the taste appears for the first time. It turns out to be noticed. The importance of the mug and the stories about tea is almost diminished here.

Stage four. Now I'm interested in the taste itself. I return to the place where there are many beautiful and beautiful mugs, to the place where I once sat and talked about tea and mugs. I come back and try to drink tea from any beautiful mug and not lose sight of the very taste of the tea. Immediately fails. But the call of the taste of tea does not let go. Here, for the first time, my own experiment begins, my research: I try to taste tea in different surroundings, try different types of tea, try tea from different mugs, timidly try to trust without choosing, starting from the very first thing that comes to hand - I try, I plunge headlong, I try not to lose the taste of tea in different situations and circumstances.

Gradually, the taste of tea fills the entire space - any stories about tea or about mugs fly by when the taste of tea there is.

There is taste here and here for the first time it is enough.

Once, while tasting tea, I quite accidentally notice the space, the very capacity of the mug. That container, which is framed by a mug, the container that at first glance fills with tea. The very container, which is surprisingly not affected by either the mug or the tea itself …