A pretty six lettered word of Greek origins- five of which are vowels- meaning ‘beautiful thinking’ or ‘goodwill’ – Eunoia is how we express simplicity with the lightness of thought we feel when we have penetrated the complexity and arrived at expression that is infectiously communicable and universally appealing. Eunoia announces our arrival at simplicity.
We experience it in Quotes, bumper stickers, poems, prayers, posters, prescriptions, lyrics, speeches, slogans, movie lines where something about it rings true, screams “eureka!” with brutal simplicity. It’s when one of your ‘riddles’ seems elegantly solved; It’s when recognizing beauty in elegance makes you immediately feel beautiful, weightless and fills you up with the goodwill to share; fills you up with Eunoia. It has something to do with getting relative to your idea of sufficiency and experiencing the simplicity, goodwill and community you harbor inside you.
Paul Dirac, the physicist, had a beautiful way of thinking when working on these ‘riddles’. He said: “To solve a problem, divide it into two parts: a simple part and a small part. If you’re clever, you’ll be able to solve the simple part. And if you’re lucky, the small part will turn out to be small enough to not really matter.”
Slightly more oxidized with denser, more woodier notes but still feeling absolutely distilled, the tea seems to have solved the riddle of delivery and experience with the Eunoia of Dirac’s thinking. It solves the simple part by introducing pleasantness of two simple notes – Baked Fruit and Oranges cued on Citrus, in a deeper, redder, full-bodied liquor, delivered on top of a fruity, sweet, muscatel layer with a dense aftertaste. Made from the AV2 leaves the flavors feel very tightly packed, almost oily – as if it’s waiting to age to express them individually- making it intense. Each sip feels like there’s more to it than we’re experiencing but its pleasantness soothes out the reasoning mind. Though short of the sommelier discipline we would be far from audacious in claiming that it reminds one of drinking a very-very pleasant wine and words of Richard Feynman, the physicist:
“A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts—physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on—remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!”
Peter O’Toole, in Lawrence of Arabia, when asked what he liked about the desert, answers “It is clean.” The flavor is exactly like that – Desert-like clean; clean like the ‘Ting’ sound wine glasses make, if only we could taste that sound!
As for the small part, it can be discarded altogether. Pleasant is enough!
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