Spring is the time when the freshest of fresh green teas is made with the very first tea leaves of the year: two tiny leaves, maybe a little more than a centimeter long and a few millimeters in length, and a bud. These are plucked, rolled, withered, pan-fired, and dried. And they’re sent off, fresh from processing, for a tea that feels absolutely amazing.

 

Purple silver is a beautiful green tea: sweet and delicate. It’s the kind of tea that you can pour in the morning and just let it steep and have cup after cup of golden-tasting tea, and remind yourself that having the freshest possible green tea is a thing you can do once a year.

Purple silver is from white2tea, but alas: I cannot give you a buy link because the white2tea philosophy is to make fresh green tea available only once per year, when they are at the freshest. 

This has been a rough week. I’m not going into details, because there is too much, and it feels like it’s just been The Week when all the things have decided to pop up like surprise prank snakes in the potato chip cans. Some of it has been personal. Some of it has been the unrelenting news cycle which just keeps delivering hit after hit.

 

One of my habits—and I’m sure it’s some odd combination of neurodivergent sprinkles that leads me to this—is to want to walk away from things the moment it feels like too much work and I’m overwhelmed. It’s not that I believe the grass will be greener elsewhere. I believe the grass will be different, and at least a different problem is interesting in a new way.

 

This is not always bad. If I were not like this, I would probably be doing a very different job at this moment. Maybe I would be a law professor. Or maybe I would never have gone to law school, and I would be a scientist of some kind. Or maybe not even that. I might  have stuck with my first impulse when I applied to college—studying Russian literature. (I do not speak Russian, but maybe I would have learned! Who knows!)

 

I think, though, that if I’d made different choices, I still would have been happy.

 

This is an odd thing to say, I think, because I’ve struggled with depression my whole life. Despite all that, though, I am still think that at base I am a fundamentally happy person. I am made happy by very simple things: good food, people I love, a good book, a nice tea.

 

This week, a number of things made me happy: a soup I made with miso and yuzu kosho as a base; a seven mile walk that I finished in two hours (I realize this isn’t exciting to the runners out there, but for me, this was great timing and steady going and I enjoyed every minute of it except the first twenty that it took me to get to the path); a surprise discovery of an old friend; the tea I told you about and a few you’ll hear about in the next handful of weeks; realizing that the nondescript bush in the yard that had me scratching my head was in fact a honeysuckle that burst into bloom. Did we plant a honeysuckle? I guess we did!

 

I’ve seen people questioning in the last week how anyone can do anything enjoyable when terrible things are happening. On the one hand, distracting yourself and pretending everything is fine isn’t helpful. But burning yourself out also helps nobody. 

 

My strategy has been this: find one thing that makes me happy: figure out one thing I can do. Step by step by step: one thing I can do; one thing that makes me happy.

 

This is a little thing, but one of the things that made this week really rough is that Pele is on a specialized diet and he hates it and hasn’t been eating. We had a very scary episode over the weekend.

 

But I tried one thing every day, and we finally have him eating appropriate amounts, and today he felt energetic enough to insist on a three mile walk at night (he actually would have gone longer, but we had to tell him that we were getting tired) after a mile walk earlier during the day. It’s the first time since his pancreatitis scare that I’ve really felt “okay, good, it feels like he’s back to himself.”

 

This doesn’t solve any of the other problems in the world. But it reminds me that doing one thing matters.

This has been Courtney's Weekly Tea, a weekly newsletter about tea, books, and everything else. If you don't want to receive this email, or do want to receive additional emails about Courtney's books/book events/etc, please use the links below to unsubscribe from this list or to manage your mailing list preferences.