Emily Dickinson wrote a poem called “Hope” is the thing with feathers. She found it prevailing in the birds and the seas and the songs. Then, over a century later Caitlin Seida found hope prevailing, somewhat, elsewhere….
“Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat!”
Hope is not the thing with feathers, That comes home to roost When you need it most. Hope is an ugly thing, With teeth and claws and Patchy fur that’s seen some shit. It’s what thrives in the discards, And survives in the ugliest parts of our world, Able to find a way to go on, When nothing else can even find a way in.
It’s the gritty, nasty little carrier of such diseases as optimism, persistence, Perseverance and joy, Transmissible as it drags its tail across your path and bites you in the ass. Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird, Emily. It’s a lowly little sewer rat, That snorts pesticides like they were Lines of coke and still Shows up on time to work the next day Looking no worse for wear.
How we find hope is as important as hope itself. How we find hope is how we find our resilience – be it from a reality that breeds hope or hope born out of strife with reality. And when we find hope, we put our relief in little containers called words and mark them with aristocratic labels like Panacea, Nostrum, Elixir, Theriac, Catholicon – the ‘cure-all’ for all our woes and afflictions! Whatever makes us hopeful also simplifies our existence for us. Finding simplicity in the muck and mire is about as close as we are ever going to get with the sacred.
Pablo Neruda’s friend, Maru Mori once knitted a pair of socks herself and gifted them to him. He immortalized its value in ‘Ode to my socks’ ending it with “The moral of my ode is this: beauty is twice beauty and what is good is doubly good, when it is a matter of two socks made of wool in winter.” John Koenig in Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows – a compendium of invented words for emotions we all feel but have no names for- picked up on ‘Maru Mori’ and defined it as ‘the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things’ –
“Most living things don’t need to remind themselves that life is precious. They simply pass the time. An old cat can sit in the window of a bookstore, whiling away the hours as people wander through. Blinking calmly, breathing in and out, idly watching a van being unloaded across the street, without thinking too much about anything. And that’s alright. It’s not such a bad way to live.
So much of life is spent this way, in ordinary time. There’s no grand struggle, no sacraments, no epiphanies. Just simple domesticity, captured in little images, here and there. All the cheap little objects. The jittering rattle of an oscillating fan; a pair of toothbrushes waiting in a cup by the sink. There’s the ragged squeal of an old screen door, the dry electronic screech of a receipt being printed, the ambient roar of someone showering upstairs. And the feeling of pulling on a pair of wool socks on a winter morning and peeling them off at the end of the day. These are sensations that pass without a second thought. So much of it is barely worth noting.
But it all still happened. All those cheap and disposable experiences are no less real than anything in our history books, no less sacred than anything in our hymnals. Perhaps we should try keeping our eyes open while we pray, and look for the meaning hidden in the things right in front of us: in the sound of Tic Tacs rattling in a box, the throbbing ache of hiccups, and the punky smell that lingers on your hands after doing the dishes. Each is itself a kind of meditation, a reminder of what is real.
We need these silly little things to fill out our lives, even if they don’t mean all that much. If only to remind us that the stakes were never all that high in the first place. It’s not always life-and-death. Sometimes it’s just life —and that’s alright”.
Manufactured hopes, manufactured words, manufactured poetry…….
Sometimes we get the feeling that we are quite simply manufacturing the flavors and aromas in our head. It’s a strange feeling of relief and responsibility – a part feels relief and satiation in their existence and a part that’s reluctant to explore what the other possibility might reveal. How else is it possible that the same teas have different things to say to different people? Then we get a partial answer – What if we unconsciously possess the ability to coalesce all our complicated experiences and meanings into an involuntary simplicity and that simplicity allows us to participate and manufacture what we observe. And tea, quite simply could be a catalyst that brings it about. Maybe we do manufacture the flavors and aromas! Maybe we’re allowed to! Now, while we wouldn’t go voicing that thought in logical company, it’s not so bad to walk around feeling a touch of the mystical, finding things capable of drawing out our participation, that quite simply we observe and ‘manufacture’ as we go along.
White teas are manufactured with ‘simplicity’, though manufactured also includes the mystical and simplicity includes its heartbreak in this context! You will experience it – with the much desired Green-notes discarded and the woodiness intentionally set at bay, with the hair still unscathed and hide still unbruised, even by the best of intentions – in the tranquil but spirited white Panacea from the TV1 cultivar. Thick in brew and almond yellow in its faint hue, its spirit most experienced in aftertaste, it is vaguely reminiscent of the Summer Caesura – TV1 White. The “cure-all” Panacea moniker comes from the first reception of Honey and Herbs in a floral swell – “smells like relief and hope!” The fruity aroma of green apples or apple peels succumb quickly to the more flowery aromas of Frangipani or Champa. The taste is Sweet – Honey and Vanilla that lasts well into the aftertaste.
Harvested along with the Spring Muse with two leaves and a bud and made at the same time, it is quite different in its feel – like it has a happy personality with a heavy soul – with “Quite a lot to narrate if you ask us, better people.”
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.