A Happy Day

 

 

 This was originally posted  March 14, 2008 at my old blog. I liked it well enough, I decide to repost with a few graphics.

The house has some age on it. It is well-kept but old enough to have learned a thing or two. It’s been around the block. The front yard has green grass and newly planted trees. The walkway winds past several bushes toward the front door where two clay chimera (qilin) wait. A tea plant grows in a bed by the walk, camellia sinensis.

Cha Shifu's Tea House

A small metal sign hangs to the right of the front door, proclaiming “TeaMaster” with a drawing of a Yixing clay teapot, a Gongfu (Kungfu) pot. To the left of the front door is the long rectangular kitchen window. There is a large, beautiful bush in front of the window. I should learn its name. Two Stellar’s jays live there. They greet visitors and watch the goings-on inside.

My Tea Master meets me at the door. “Hi Pierce, come in!” He looks much younger than his age.  He is squarely built and has the broad shoulders of someone who regularly plays at taijijian (tai chi sword). He moves from his center, his dandian. He has balance and grace and is obviously connected to di (earth) and tian (heaven). His smile is genuine and welcoming.

I enter and smell the pleasant, homey smell of wood smoke. It is winter in Seattle, cold and wet. The warming fire is also welcoming. The flooring is compressed bamboo. It is beautiful and sturdy. My Tea Master believes in sustaining the earth. Bamboo does that.

Cha Shifu (Tea Master or Tea Teacher or Honored Tea Father) leads me through the clean and compact kitchen. Several large white cups with metal strainers in them sit on the counter. He has been tasting tea, professionally, judging its quality, comparing it.

Past the kitchen is a small wood paneled room with a long table made of compressed bamboo. Six bamboo chairs surround it. Several of the chairs are the type I think of as “Shifu” chairs. They remind me of my Internal Arts Shifu, my Grand Shifu who told the story of Master Jou, Tsung-Hwa. Master Jou wondered why some martial artists lived longer than others. He, Master Jou, concluded that the healthiest men had perfect posture, which included sitting well. These chairs invite proper posture.

To my right, to the west, is a room all of bamboo and glass and light. There is a long bamboo table for study and calligraphy, and a taller table with two statues of the goddess Kuan Yin. Each statue has a small tea cup in front and each cup contains tea. Cha Shifu has taught me to pour a cup to the goddess each day to honor her. The room feels good, it is a right place to be, like my Grand Shifu’s garden in Texas.

Luyu The Father of Tea

Cha Shifu and I sit. We talk of various things, the weather, friends, health, tai chi, while he prepares tea. Today is a new tea so he hands me the pot with the wet leaves that I might sample their virtue. The aroma is sweet and enticing, fine leaves indeed! I look down. The leaves are full and whole and healthy. They seem happy with the hot water that has brought them back to life. There is qi.

Re-hydrating tea leaves is often called “Awakening the dragon.” And I always feel a certain dragon qi, dragon energy about newly invigorated leaves of the camellia sinensis plant…at least when the tea is a good one.

Cha Shifu pours. I tap the table twice with two fingers thanking him, silently, for the good tea which he is serving. Tasting, I suck the tea back across the palate and along the sides of the tongue then across the back of the tongue and down the throat. This is a good tea, it is sweet and tastes of bamboo and what I used to call vanilla, but have now learned should really be spoken of as “orchid.” Orchid is one sign of a fine tea (and vanilla is a member of the orchid family).

The tail down my throat is smooth, and long, and pleasing. Cha Shifu sometimes uses the English word “lingering” as a noun and I have come to appreciate the concept. A good tea does indeed linger on the palate, sometimes for tens of minutes. And it is a pleasant sensation that one is loathe to relinquish.

I guess at the tea and get it right—Bai Mu Dan—White Peony, one of the few true and authentic Chinese white teas. It is from Fujian province. Cha Shifu is always pleased when I guess correctly—note the use of the word “guess”—and he is never too surprised when I am wrong, as long as I am not too wrong.

We drink the tea and discuss it. This White Peony comes from his own gardens in Fujian and it is made from spring leaves instead of the more usual summer leaves. Spring is sweeter than summer, but more fragile.

The tea is indeed a good one and lasts for many pourings and we talk about our tai chi and he tells me more about Kuan Yin. It is a good day. In the Way of Tea (chadao) it is right to enjoy the now, the present. What could be better than tea friends? What could be better than the focus, a tea meditation really, where the woes and worries of life are forgotten in a place of good company and good tea?

Finally, the tea is drunk and it is time to work. Yang balances yin and work earns the repose and the splendid tea. To quote Cha Shifu “Tea makes a happy day.”