In the Making

I’ve added a tall lavender candle to the ritual of writing in the early morning – for isn’t writing a ritual just as morning prayers, or the bath, or the cup of tea for some? Ritual makes something more than what it is, assigns meaning to even the simplest of tasks such as washing clothes, or mopping a floor, or baking bread – otherwise it’s just rote work that has to be done – the tending of belly and beast.  A human might go crazy with the tedium of rote work all their lives – and that’s what housework or factory work or office work can be.  But to create a ritual is to make the ordinary more than what it is, to elevate it to the spiritual – the creative.  Because my life has been ordinary beyond choice or reason, I understand that the most commonplace, tedious work can be made into something more than itself, more than the physical scrawl.

For years I had to make games out of folding clean clothes – creating category, assigning priority, making order out of chaos, placing color next to shade – a neatly turned pile might inspire the will to bake a new bread, which might in turn create a poem – and, odd to say, but . . . folding clothes, like baking bread, is a very creative warm-up time for me now, a time when thoughts turn from chaos to order, words stack one atop another.  Something reorders and aligns itself in the brain when the body creates physical order in its environment.  I’ve never bought the idea of a messy desk as the sign of a creative person.

Three years ago, I attended a lecture and demonstration on the art of the tea ceremony. This was at the University of Richmond where I was working to attain a teacher's license so I could have meaningful and real employment as a high school English teacher. The Asian woman, a professor and guest lecturer from another university, had written a book on Asian craftsmanship and ceremony – though I can’t recall the title, or her name, just now.  It took me three years to learn to make a decent bowl of tea, she said, while the audience laughed and began to love her.  I know she said this because I took notes that evening, and wrote a long poem about her in the wee hours of the night when I couldn’t sleep . . . The tea ceremony for three or five friends might take six months for which to prepare, she told us.  The bowl of tea is not the subject of quenching thirst or of warming bellies and hands – it’s a method of transformation for the preparer as well as the partaker.

I’ve always been what people call a tea drinker – for it seems people and nations are categorized that way, as tea drinkers or coffee drinkers – and so the next morning, having not slept well as I’ve already said, I opened the kitchen tea cabinet to find my life in disarray.  For thought is influenced by vision, she said.  I emptied out the cabinet and threw away the old stale teas and organized the worthy teas; wiped out the stray leaves and crumbs that had somehow invaded or migrated there – stray thoughts, interruptions, she might have said.  And then I found the small green canister of matcha tea, bought long ago to make green tea ice cream for my family – but had never gotten around to it – and that spoke volumes to me – and so I opened the vacuum sealed tea packet and began to breathe in the verdant ground tea leaves – each smell and sound has significance, she said – and began to make the tea according to how she showed us at the university classroom – a bowl hand turned beyond the house is best, she said, and rocks polished by rainwater to cleanse the mind, and the wearing of a summer robe . . . but I did my best, taking the water’s temperature, using a rounded bowl, swirling counter-clockwise . . . and clearing extraneous thoughts from the mind – perhaps a lifetime to make a proper bowl of tea – and, as I sipped my bowl of tea – and I’m not inventing this: I suddenly really saw the smudgy kitchen window and the streaked kitchen cabinets and the cupboard doors that hadn’t closed properly in years because of warped thoughts or intentions – I mean, because of humidity or something – and the drawer of mismatched spoons that ground sawdust onto the contents of the bottom cabinet each time I opened or closed the drawer – wearing me down – I mean, the drawer, being worn down – invasions of privacy . . . crumbs . . . the disorder of mind, the straying of purpose . . . I might never have a friend over for tea, I thought.

Since that cup of matcha tea three years ago, I’ve bagged the idea of teaching high school English (although I did get the license and taught one semester),  have claimed an alignment with the thing I’ve always wanted to do – although I can’t prove it's a “marketable” choice – and it suddenly becomes clear today as I sit here with a cup of tea and the new candle flickering sprightly:  isn’t it odd that the kitchen was renovated since that epiphianic day?  The new cabinets are made of lyptus wood, one of the hardest woods on the planet – because I  will not be worn down again – and the cabinets and drawers have a kind of device that makes them close silently – for sound and smell are significant.

I began to write this morning about the lavender candle as an added ritual to the physical act of writing . . . but somehow that small thing turned into more . . . perhaps a lifetime, her voice still echoes, for the making of a bowl of tea.