SUMMER SOOTHSAYER – 50 Gms

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale

“Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days. Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals. Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices. Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you. Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart. Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope, where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all the things you did and could have done. Remember treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes pointing again and again down, down into the black depths” – Dan Albergotti

“There is only one place to live – the impossible!” – A little-known soothsayer once wrote that from the belly of a whale. Staring at the impossibility of a moment, afflicted by a strange fate yet enamored by the truth it revealed and possessed by a compulsion to express with absolute disregard for one’s own wellbeing, would be a fair assessment of soothsayers. A little less fair yet pertinent would be as doomed truthtellers, maniacs, transgressors of boundaries between the physical and metaphysical, conversing with the invisible and tormented by the visible. One such maniac managed to capture his ‘transgressions and torments’ in Cuba, literally, ‘Before night falls’: ‘Being a fugitive living in the woods at the time, I had to write before it got dark. Now darkness was approaching again, only more insidiously. It was the dark night of death. I really had to finish my memoirs before nightfall’. Reinaldo Arenas describes the unblemished magic of his childhood that prevailed despite the abject poverty and ruthless persecution – “I am that angry and lonely child of always, that throws you the insult of that angry child of always and warns you: if hypocritically you pat me on the head, I would take that opportunity to steal your wallet. I am that child of always, before the panorama of imminent terror, imminent leprosy, imminent fleas, of offenses and the imminent crime. I am that repulsive child that improvises a bed out of an old cardboard box and waits, certain that you will accompany me”.

It is the same voice and sentiment – angry and magical – a truth that the flavor of muscatel harbors, that can only sometimes be felt and heard, this clearly, speaking through the complexity!  We looked long and hard, for both the sentiment and the tea, before it spoke through the panorama.

The soothsayer comes from the highest, most isolated and most obscure AV2 fields of Darjeeling. It is concentrated – with undiluted sincerity and a strange detachment – that is, before the sincerity and detachment became hard to live with and demanded expression! It would be naïve to think that harshness of experience demands the expression to be stern. Far from sternness- in fact detached from – it harbors audacity; a certain sensitivity and softness of expression delivered intensely and magically- like a Red Wine with unflinching notes of elusive Muscatel– a sweet, fruity hay-ness bearing an ease, in a thick and dark brew. The flavors are packed densely under the garb of woodiness – Vanilla, Sandalwood, Spices and Strawberries – all revealed as the tea surrenders temperature. It’s worth mentioning that the Soothsayer shares its neighboring heights with the Yabukita Highland and the Unknown Legend – both from different cultivars but bearing similar and intense expressions.