“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust…. and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
It may not be the first thing that comes to mind, but what is home, if not the first place you learn to run away from and the first place to run back to. Solitude is very much the same way – you’re either running away from or running back to – even if that may not be the first thing to come to mind, solitude is “home”. It’s not an easy thought to retain two conflicting ideas meaningfully – authenticity vs attachment, intimacy vs independence. It requires redefinition; a journey through frightful and harsh country.
Rilke, in his journey through harsh country was able to meaningfully resolve the conflict between intimacy and solitude – “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.” He further wrote encouragingly to a young poet, words to live by when in harsh country “… perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”
It is absolutely stunning – all that, which comes after what comes first!
The Yabukita Highland comes from the highest harvestable altitude of Darjeeling – that is to say, it comes from a harsh place – where meaning is surpassed by its seriousness. Meaning from such places-, like most meanings -comes out of solitude, except the solitude of these places are neither inflicted nor chosen but rather bestowed, observed and guarded – Life here is known by its seriousness. Same can be said about the Highland – solitary, introspective, resolute, intense and patient – very different from the other Yabukitas.
The leaves are smaller – the high altitudes don’t allow much in terms of tips and size but their yield comes bearing a hard-to-miss ‘teaness’ that cannot be fully described by the flavors. There is a thick, oily, ‘redness’ to its taste; a sweet, woody robustness, sheltering the notes of hay and herbs that never steps outside its sweetness to affirm its robustness. The sturdy woodiness – far from any hubris; fragrant with Plum, Sweet Fennel and unsweetened Cocoa, harboring the elusive, musky hay like finish – is best described by its simplicity, sweetness, solitude and strength. While the Highland is different, in flavor and feeling from all the other Summer Yabukitas – the ones bearing the likes of Whitman and Baudelaire – this definitely bears Rilke’s reminder “…. the space around you is beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend.”
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