Letters to The - #6

The older I get, the younger I feel. When I was a child, I didn’t understand why I was treated like one. I saw the world clearly, factually. I was frustrated at my lack of privilege. I felt the endogenous wisdom of my soul, and hated that no one saw or acknowledged it. I took myself seriously, and took the world seriously. I’m not a young woman anymore, by any nation’s standards, and yet I feel more like a child than ever before. My sense of playfulness seems to expand with my freedom in the world. I find joy in smaller and smaller things. I laugh with greater abandon. The angst of my adolescence has been replaced by awe and silliness and curiosity. I don’t feel like I’ve grown up. I feel like I’ve grown into my own childhood and that it will last until I die.

Letters to The - #5

I did want to disown myself. I wanted to learn about purity, about earth purity and divine purity, by rinsing the body clean of the buildup and the constant furious input.

The only truly pure things are air and water, and even then, I must equivocate. The air has to be good clean light mountain air, or the puncturing hot air of the empty dessert when there is no wind, no dust to interfere, or the strong ocean air, not of the beach, but in the middle of the sea.

With water, it’s even harder. There is so much we don’t know or see and so much we can’t control. The most pure waters, fresh rain from a clean sky, hot springs, or melted snow running in a clean and clear riverbed, can’t always be found--can almost never be found in my life--and the water from cities has unknown chemicals and additives. "Chemicals and additives" is something we hear about a lot. We don’t know what it means, what they are composed of, but we’re quite afraid of chemicals and additives.

Still, even city air and city water are more pure than hamburgers.

I went ten days without hamburgers. I went ten days without any food at all. I had coffee, which is probably the least pure of all the semi-pure drinks. And I had bottled, colorful, calorie-free drinks from companies I’ve never met, made by people I don’t trust. Those are not pure at all, even though the labels have pictures of beautiful slices of fruit. There is no fruit, and the lie makes it even more impure. I had tea, which has a different kind of purity. Tea has the purity of being, in the leaves and their scents and oils and greenness. And I had water, which has the purity of non-being.

I had to teach myself the art of fasting. I first didn’t eat for a day, then two, three, five, seven. Finally, ten. This seemed a stretch. How did you do it for forty and in the dessert, not in a home with a WiFi enabled thermostat, memory foam mattress, and a water purifier? I felt weak and dizzy. My stomach churned in anger, resentment, and confusion. My legs were heavy, my spine slouched down into itself as though all my energy had fled to the four corners of the earth and I was the center of all gravity, caving in on myself. I lay on the floor and told my husband I might vomit. He looked at me with concern, but he didn’t say to stop. He didn’t say to keep going. He told me to listen, to think, and to do what is right.

It’s so hard to know what is right.

I ate again, and then I didn’t. Three square meals a day felt foreign, like an ancient American myth. Funny, I thought, how people used to believe in that so long ago.

Womanhood and food are complicated when mixed in the same bowl. The apple and Eve both tempted Adam. We have curves, flesh that is ripe for biting and suckling. I think the most pure meal might be a raw mango eaten whole, when you let it drip down your chin, onto your breast, the pulp clinging to your throat like a strand of hair. There is woman in the mango. I’ve always felt close to food, especially fruit, leaves, stems, and roots, like these are my cousins, and I have to keep them close.

A woman eating is a woman being a woman. A fruit being eaten is a fruit being a fruit. So what am I when I am not eating? I find myself genderless. Disinterested in sex, like everything is too holy to touch with my body. Only the tea leaves still dance in my heart. Everything else is in silence, waiting for the fast to break.

In ten days, I saw my body shrink away from itself. I saw my skin hang from my bones like a damp sheet on a line. I felt miserable the first time, but it felt better than being full. I only know how to be full or empty, nothing in between. Empty is pure, and full is a different kind of purity, a different kind of commitment, one that demands self-sacrifice. It is a demand that you stretch yourself to meet. The second time I fasted for ten days, I learned how to take care of my body while fasting, and I was less tired, less dizzy and weak. I drank more tea and water, less marketing and packaging and chemicals and additives.

I continue to fast often. I am a woman who has a complicated relationship with food. I feel too close to it. Sometimes, I just need a vacation from it. I restore the purity of my body by fasting. I let my human urges go unsated for a while, and when I return to being fully human, I am more in control.

Today, my husband sick in bed with a virus, I rose, and I performed the tea ceremony without him. We used to sit and do this together, but not often enough anymore. We always say we’ll get back to it, that it’s one of our foundations. Pour the water, count the seconds... tip the pot… blow… sip.

Pu’erh is an ancient tea that was once so valued, it was used as currency. It was carried by nobles and kings across China, aging, fermenting, growing dark and mild like a strong old warrior. It has purifying properties. It is a good tea for a person who hasn’t eaten in seven days.

I rose, and I made the tea dance with my hands. The pot is brown Yixing clay. It sits on a tray made of slatted bamboo. There is a glass pitcher, called a fairness pitcher. It is used by amateur performers of the tea ceremony to ensure that all who come to sip receive an infusion of equal strength.

In the tea ceremony, you drink the tea many times, pouring the water seven times, maybe eight, until tea is nearly just water again. It is a cycle of birth, life, and death.

First, you rinse the tea, and throw away the first infusion. It is a short infusion, a few seconds, to let the tea bloom, shake off the dust, and prepare itself to give its best. It is a mother’s water breaking, the first sign of new life, the precedent. We live for the following eight infusions, the following eight decades. Each steeping, an age. The first is light, youthful. It hints at what maturity will bring. It tastes like itself, but it is not yet itself.

You smell the underside of the teapot lid before you first sip, and this reminds me of new love, a nose nestling close behind a paramore’s ear, catching a scent of perfume and shampoo and musk, the sensitive skin sending messages that even better sensations will soon follow.

I think the tea knows that more is expected of it.

The second steeping is an abundance. Over-eager, masculine, and far too forthcoming. You only have a moment to pour it out, or else it exhausts itself by giving too much, and you ruin the strength of the remaining six infusions. Carefully, you take the adolescence of the tea, begging it to hold something back, to not let everything be revealed before its time.

The twenties are also rocky, but more moderated. The journey now depends on the character, the quality. The thirties, the forties, the fifties, they are smooth, some ups and downs. You get to know the bitter edges, the sweetness at the center, and the nuances of each note. There is cocoa, coffee, smoke, mulch, the scent of a forest floor after it rains, even sometimes pine, amber, and ocean. It all depends on where the tea came from, and where it has been until now. The final infusions are gentle, sweet, faint. They don’t rush out. You have to wait for them much longer.

I’m turning thirty soon. I looked up the other day my age on Mars, and learned that if I had been born on Mars, I’d be turning sixteen soon, just a month after my thirtieth earth birthday. I find this comforting. I also tell myself that it’s quite a coincidence that I am about to turn thirty and that I live in a culture with a base-10 numerical system. The number means nothing, if I am not of this world. But I am of this world.

This is why I fast. I cease to be woman, to be American, to be twenty-nine, to be beholden to the conventions that put lines on our forehead and expiration dates on our vitality. I have long conversations with leaves of tea that live their entire lives in the course of a morning, so selfless that they cannot help but overshare, like a loquacious socialite who spills bubbling secrets into your ear on the dance floor. You find yourself feeling like Ruth at the helm of a pot of pu’erh, noticing in astonishment that the harvesters have left behind too much grain, that your gleaning is being made abundant by a benevolent source.

You probably never drank pu’erh when you were on earth, but things that you never touched can still be holy. The sound of the canopy of a Costa Rican rainforest. The light in early morning in the Sierra Nevadas. The first snow of winter. A cake of pu’erh that travelled from China, to Seattle, to me.

I’m not sure when it becomes holy, but I know that it is. Set apart. Dedicated to worship. Glory to the divine.

My husband and I consecrated our marriage with prayers to you, the name of Jesus, ancient Celtic rituals performed quietly away from the crowd, and a small cup of tea passed tenderly between us. It was hot, light, and hallowed. A protestant pastor stood by, his first marital tea ceremony underway, smiling, blessing us.

Sometimes I want to ask your pardon for inventing new rituals to honor you. Sometimes, I believe that is what I was put on earth to do.

Letters to The - #4

People say that you wrote a book to guide us but there are so many human fingerprints all over it. I haven’t known how to read it in a long time with the spirit that I read it as a child. Parts of it, though, Psalms, Proverbs, James, the Sermon on the Mount---they will always echo in my conscience.

Genesis is one of the best parts of the Bible for me. There is a garden where people eat trees--certain parts of them. It says fruits, but probably flowers, roots, stems, and leaves as well, I should think, and let’s suppose not just trees but also other types of plants. People eat, wander, garden, make love, speak new words, and name things, even themselves.

There is one tree you aren’t supposed to touch, and another that you are supposed to touch often. You are in both trees, but just as with lightning and the ocean floor, you keep some things to yourself. However, we homo sapiens insist on keys tied to kite strings and deep ocean submarines, and we touch the tree that you reserved for no one, for looking but not for touching.

We then suffer. We are electrocuted, we are crushed and drowned, and we learn sin. But we also learn ironworking, long-distance electronic communication, and space travel. Nothing is ever the same again. I wonder if we regret it. I am sure that I do. I’ve been trying to get back there for years, but it’s quite hard to find Eden in first world west coast America. I try, though. I stopped eating animals, and the food that animals make for their children. I stopped pledging allegiance to war. I don’t drink cola. I live among trees and eat fruit every day. None of this is enough, however. I am still not in Eden.

Origin stories can make or break a mythology. Christianity got it right. There is resplendent beauty, simplicity and innocence, a grave but forgivable error, and genuine, pure sensuality. Our divine tragedy, our separateness, is elegant in its construction. We are here, but we are not supposed to be. We are animal but we are spirit. We forgivable but we are flawed. In being both of everything dark and light, we can never be all one and all whole. In being too much, we feel that we are nothing. And in feeling that we are nothing, we need you to make us Something.

I find myself enchanted by Eden, adjusting my dreamy-eyed lens on the world to a paradise-tinted soft-focus. It’s much easier and more lovely to proceed in this way, but this computerized, post-post-modern purgatory of my present is also mine, and I can’t disown it without disowning too much of myself.