This was the first instance of term I've come to love, seasonal bridge: the way a tea can be a bridge into experiencing the elemental wonder of a season. Images like appreciating absences in the autumn, rocks dusted in snow being both gathering and expansive, and the way that tea creates a hearth among friends all speak to me now as directly as on the day I wrote the letter, back in 2022.
Dear Friends,
What I find so fun about soaking into the seasons is that they each draw such different things out of me, and really out of all the people and elements I encounter. I’m a person that is easily influenced by my surroundings. I love to visit and chameleon with a variety of people, and a mixture of diverse environments—and nothing shifts an environment like a seasonal change. Being with a friend, a tree, or a lake is not the same in winter as in summer. Likewise, a tea is quite different in each season. I love to drink a variety of teas, to soak in their unique company, but when a tea can connect me to the evocative elements of the season, that’s the best. When I choose a tea for the season, that’s the first thing I’m looking for. Let’s explore this with two seasonal teas for the transition into winter: the Wild Lapsang, a warming red tea grown on naturally diverse hillsides in Fujian; and the Aged Milanxiang (Honey Orichid Aroma) from Pheonix Mountain, an oolong that in this case has been fully oxidized. Harvested back in 2018, it has been aging for 4 years.
“Dead leaves on the dirty ground and I know you’re not around.” - Jack White
“All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray.” - John Phillips
As a connoisseur of “dead” brown leaves, I’m not surprised in the least that the dead leaves that live under gray skies and on dirty grounds are evocative time-beings capable of inspiring some pretty great seasonal hits. The above quoted two songs carried forward by The Mamas and the Papas, and The White Stripes, are examples of the power of those brown leaves to open up vast realms filled with feeling and images. They reflect the emotion of the season, which in early winter undoubtedly has a strong element of sadness. The Wild Lapsang that I’m sharing with you is a bridge to those brown leaves. The same way that taste profiles create a bridge to food pairings, this seasonal profile is an evocative bridge to a certain seasonal pairing. This tea enhances and articulates the early winter with a taste and aroma that evokes leaves blowing in the wind or getting caught in wet snow.
At this very specific seasonal moment, the potent fragrance of Aged Milanxiang is a bridge to the season that might even be a bridge to the ancestors. Halloween, Day of the Dead, Samhain, and transition into winter, are the names for a time when all is laid bare and we can see and feel our relationship to death, loss, and our subtle connections to the densely populated world of semi-transparent visages. It is a time to honor the past, the elders, and the scent of time, where the past lingers even now. Milanxiang, or Honey Orchid Aroma is a popular tea from Phoenix Mountain, as it has been aging, the aroma has soaked thoroughly into the leaves as a dry perfume. Drinking this aged tea, there truly is a sense of the past, a sense of missing what is lost, and for me at least, the pleasure of getting to feel that reminiscing. Reminiscing is a simple joy too often skipped over in the rush. There are so many beautiful things worth missing. What a refreshing drink for the season, a potion of reminiscing to bring to the ancestral feast.
A Tea for the Time-Being
I used the word “time-being” above to refer to those evocative brown leaves, a word that I heard from Ruth Ozeki, and that she heard from an all-time acclaimed wander, linger, and loiterer—certainly an ancestor for Via Tiempo in that regard—the great Japanese Buddhist ambler and life-artist Dogen.
An ancient buddha once said:
For the time being, standing on the tallest mountain top,
For the time being, moving on the deepest ocean floor,
For the time being, a demon with three heads and eight arms,
For the time being, the golden sixteen-foot body of the buddha
For the time being, a monk’s staff or a master’s fly swatter
For the time being, a pillar or a lantern,
For the time being, any Dick or Jane,
For the time being, the entire earth and the boundless sky.
—Dogen Zenji, “For the Time Being.”
(as printed in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being)
To the perfect phrase, “time-being,” I’m recklessly adjoining the word seasonal. Not only timeless, and rooted in time, but seasonal too. How trendy! Seasonal time-beings are the ones who absorb and express the seasonal time they are in. Leaves that sprout in spring and find their way to the ground in autumn are some of the most easily detected seasonal time-beings—making their impressions on us even as we pass by their hillsides on our way to buy groceries. When we have a closer encounter with a time-being, quite often lingering ensues. A rock lightly dusted in snow is both grounding and expansive—holding and expressing, gathering and emitting. A teapot is gathering and emitting the fragrance of the leaves, calling you to take a sip.
Unraveling in clay pots: tea is of course a seasonal time-being. But it is one with a special quality for tea-drinkers. It acts almost as the simple hyphen in the phrase seasonal time-beings, connecting being to time and drawing you to hover in playful proximity to the season.
Tortoise Play
If seasonal tea is the bridge, then lingering is the only way to cross it. What worlds will open for you when you linger in the season? Last weekend I took tea and extra cups over to the farmer’s market, to enjoy some chance encounters with other seasonal time-beings. This is a practice I call Tortoise Play, named after this image:
In addition to meeting some crows, breezes, and leaves, I happened across two friends I’ve made recently, and together we got to speaking of seasons and sipping tea as brown leaves fell into my peddler’s basket. It was a chance encounter, lended a hearth by having tea to share. We sipped and shared until we could hear the tea and the season humming.
In such a world, drinking Wild Lapsang on a bench there in the square—in an unstoppable looping back of imagination and taste—my friend Daniella’s tasting notes arose as follows:
Mushroom growing out of a skull. Fallen log in the damp woods. The footprints in the mud that a toad left behind. Playful notes for this spooky season. (We’ll be back to providing our usual tasting notes for the winter solstice teas).
Early winter is a perfect season to explore yourself as a seasonal time-being, living in a world full of dancing fragments and specters. So sit down with your spectral self, invite a friend, or wander into the world for some tortoise play. In this season of fallen leaves and emerging frost, all is laid bare, not just the ancestors who visit to sip our fragrant offerings of food and drink, but even the people walking around in the park are seen without veils, skeletons themselves (and ourselves) ready to dance and connect over a pot of tea.
For the time being, a Tea Peddler named Michael
