Tea in meditation

On the 31st of December I attended a tea ceremony with Kim Campbell. I loved it and I’ve recorded some insights and memories that came to me in the meditation. After I wrote this list, I felt that the tea had opened an inward facing door, allowing me to receive my own experience and what was already within my being.

I also felt that this first ceremony was an introduction, that the tea was introducing itself to me by showing me all the places in my life where its energy has already touched me. And that makes me very curious about what the next tea meditation ceremony could be like.  

The basics: The tea was a white tea called ‘Moonlight White’ from the province in China where tea originated from. Tea is thousands of years old and has been used in meditation for thousands of years. The tea meditation ceremony originated in China but was adopted by Japan and modified to take a humbler form: less about showcasing treasures, and more about connecting to the natural world. ‘Moonlight White’ is harvested from a tea forest — wild and uncultivated. I envisioned what this forest might look like as a drank in the steam and was instantly transported to Kalimpong’s winding mountain roads, obscured by mist. The tea led me many places in my mind; what follows is an attempt to catalogue them.

∞ drinking whiskey on the roof in Kalimpong, overlooking the Teesta Valley to the south and the foothills marching north towards Tibet.

∞ that same ridge at sunset, the hills coloured violet (above), where I met my father in meditation once, a few years after his death.

∞ the children at the orphanage across the road who I can’t forget and tally the ages they’d be now on my fingers whenever I think of them.

∞ walking up and down those hills, to the market, to Delo hill, to Bhutan, into the gloom, thinking of the thousands of years people have been walking trails through the forest to towns and markets, up and down mountains.

∞ Chaying Lhamo, our landlord, the way she was pregnant the whole time we lived there but we didn't know it until near the end, when she was in her third trimester. I don't remember a baby, so I think we left before she had it.

∞ of going to Lhamo’s house for dinner down in the village below where her elderly Tibetan parents lived and cared for her young son while she was up at the house we lived in, working out of her shop. How I insisted on making pesto pasta for all of us for dinner, hoping to avoid having to explain my being vegetarian and M’s being vegan, or awkwardly turning down food or eating it anyway. How the power went out a few hours before we were scheduled to arrive and I had to make the pesto by hand, chopping almonds as finely as I could manage. How dry and terrible it was but I took it anyway. How her young son and her parents tried it and grimaced, set their bowls down and didn’t pick them up again. How Lhamo forced it down though I insisted she only eat it if she liked it, that it wasn’t important to me, that I was only trying to be polite. When she finally laughed and set it down said it was terrible, I was so relieved, and we all relaxed after that.

∞ Lhamo telling us that her husband was the first Tibetan to climb Mount Everest but unofficially, as Tibet no longer legally exists as a nation. We met her husband once in our four months there, as he was stationed in the Indian Military elsewhere.

∞ I saw again the photo on the wall of her house, of her husband at the top of Mount Everest holding a photograph of the Dalai Lama. And the photo beside it of her husband and the Dalai Lama both holding the photograph of his first ascent together and smiling. And the photo beside that one, of her husband at the top of Everest on his second ascent, holding the photo of he and the Dalai Lama holding the photo of his first ascent holding the original photo of the Dalai Lama. The photo within the photo within the photo like an infinity mirror except looking at them never made me dizzy.

∞ drinking the tea, I see how I have been drawn to mountain climbing narratives and Everest narratives ever since, even though it’s something I never want to do.

∞ how Lhamo took me to the tailor to have a chupa made and when the couple that owned the internet café saw me wearing it at Buddha’s Birthday, they started bringing me a tea made with yak butter every time I went to the internet café. The smell of yak butter turned my stomach, but I went to the café most days and wouldn’t refuse the gift. When M came, they’d give him one too, but he was vegan and gave his to me. I found myself drinking both, even though I didn’t like it. Sometimes I'd take the tea out with me to buy a single cigarette from the stall next door. I’d crouch down somewhere to smoke my cigarette and discreetly tip the tea out. But I felt deeply ashamed of tipping out the tea because it was a waste and a gift and there was so much poverty, so I usually just drank it, even though the smell of it turned my stomach.

∞ of Sikkim, of Gangtok (its capital) with its lush views of green and ic-covered mountains, as though we weren’t in India anymore but in Switzerland. Sikkim was my favourite and the most beautiful part of India (I thought). Of walking the monastic trail over four days with M and M. Of Yuksum, a beautiful monastic village seemingly with more yaks than people, under the imposing peak of Mount Kangchenjunga. How I started finally going deeper in my writing there, one rainy afternoon in the monastic hostel by myself, still carrying around cheap notebooks and shipping them home when they were full.

∞ Of taking the train from Kolkata to Varanasi and back again after a series of Naxalite attacks blasting train tracks. Of being terrified but getting on the overnight train anyway. Of waking in the middle of the night, the train flying on the tracks, faster than any other train we’d been on (several) as though the driver thought he might outrun an explosion. I’d wake and I remember thinking we’re still alive. Then I’d shut my eyes and blackness would descend. I always struggle to fall asleep but, on that train, I fell back to sleep instantly. Denial is a mighty impulse. If we were going to die, I didn’t want to be awake for it.

∞ of Digboi and of walking to Margherita with M and M, taking the road as far as we could go, where Margherita became a road over the mountains to Myanmar, winding through a tiger reserve. I see again the steady stream of people arriving, in vehicles but mostly on bicycle or on foot, and one man riding on the back of an elephant. I remember the feeling of the jungle pressing in and a sense that the way was barred to us. Just this feeling I had but have never articulated, that the road kept going and became another country entirely, one we were not allowed to enter, though there was no visible outpost or border, just this sense that the way was barred to us, that everything within us, once as equally ancient as this mountain pass into Myanmar, was too long dead.

∞ of riding a truck from Thailand to the border and entering Myanmar for a day with M and C. Of walking over the bridge into that country and watching a handful of people below, dressed quite nicely as though for work, sitting on innertubes while a younger boy paddled them across the river, while the guards watched on, possibly with fatter pockets. Of getting about a kilometre down the main road where the outpost faded to open land and the soldiers clustered around the last shack straightened themselves and shouldered their rifles to turn us back.

∞ of Malaysian Borneo with M and B, couch surfing in Kuching. Seeing proboscis monkeys in the national parks and being chased by macaques. The guided night walk we took where we saw a flying lemur with a baby in her pouch fly across the trail and scorpions under a blacklight at the base of trees. Looking for sun bears and the corpse flower. When B actually wandered off the trail and found one, but I was too anxious to leave the trail because we were so far from anywhere and no one was around. When B left the trail, M and I waited for him. After a few moments of silence, the forest started up again. Ants continued marching and birds continued singing and the industriousness of the forest went on despite us. I felt how easy it would be to vanish. I hoped Ben would find a sun bear or a corpse flower and hurry back to the trail to tell us so we could carry on. To me, at twenty-four, it felt like if we just kept moving, we could outrun just about anything — pain or vanishing or any kind of irreparable change.

∞ of Cambodia, the ghost I woke to in one room and how few old people there were anywhere. Of staying near Angkor Wat and M refusing to go because it was a tourist trap and not having the courage to go alone. Being so close to something so ancient and not going. So free and so foolish.

∞ Ha Long Bay in Vietnam, the trash wake trailing from the boat trip we took in the bay. How they told us we could go swimming to get us onboard and then warned against it once we were there because of the trash, and the oily sheen on the water, and rumours of tourist slicing themselves in half on dives onto rocks. I really just so badly wanted to go swimming, for nine long months before we got to Thailand. That pulse in my head and heart, always looking for water, always wanting to get in. I didn’t understand it then, but it makes perfect sense to me now.

∞ another boat trip from Nha Trang out into the South China Sea. When we were quite far out, the guy who crewed the boat ushered us all into the water and swam with a couple of pitchers of neon liquor out to a lilo, and once he was on it, began shouting for us to drink the shots he handed out as we treaded water around him. I distinctly remember feeling, not for the first and not for the last time, that I was on the wrong boat.

∞ flying into South Korea two years later, for the first time, early in the morning, the mist and clouds on the hills and the sun golden above everything.

∞ the hours I spent sitting or standing before Yang Yongliang’s ‘Artificial Wonderland’, the huge black and white city soundscape installed at the DPAG (Dunedin Public Art Gallery) for a short time in 2019 when I was trying my best to woo F. Following the trail of Chinese things, the calligraphy, the tea, the body work, the qigong, all the hope and effort that went into falling in love with someone who would not love me back.  

∞ drinking milky tea in the northeast, in the shade of the shack before we caught the river boat to Majuli.

∞ the barley tea we served at Jizo and drank on cold days. Lots of memories of working at Jizo and of Hikari. I didn’t know it then, but he would be the best boss I’d ever have (so far). 

∞ the ‘Moonlight White’ tea felt so clean compared to coffee or to milky tea, so cleansing. I felt awake and calm, bright and clean.

∞ I cried streams of quiet tears, but it did not feel like a release. More like receiving. Like a gate was unlocked and the way was cleared. What if this is the point? Not to know more or get more or do more, but to see clearly where you've been, to see clearly where you are, to see clearly who you are here.

∞ I would like to purchase some of this tea, to sit cross legged with it on my bolster. I want to be cleaned by it again, to have the gates always open.

Chaying Lhamo and her young son beneath one of the Everest portraits. Kalimpong, West Bengal, India, 2009.