I remember the first time I had rock oolong. It was part of the white2tea tea club in early 2022, before I started this newsletter, when I was still in a rapidly expanding tea world. I was excited, because I enjoyed oolongs.
Excuse me for a moment while I show you my koi fish tea pot.
Back to the tea.
I remember the first time I had rock oolong: I also remember that it was this exact one. It was part of the white2tea tea club in early 2022, and I remember it arriving and sorting through a half-dozen small packs of tea with names like “stone milk” and “orchid heart” and finally settling on this exact one.
Revisiting tea is always an interesting experience. One the one hand, your first of a tea is not always going to be your best tea—you are, after all, a baby learner!—but because it is first, your memory may be fonder than the taste.
I remember drinking six steeps of this tea, marveling at the flavor, the way it changed from steep to steep, growing sweeter and less minerally with each successive pour off the tea, before coming back to the original rinse, poured off after five seconds of steeping, to a shock of mineral flavor. I remember the dazed, delightful feeling of wellbeing—my first time experiencing the phenomenon known as being “tea drunk.” I sent an email to the proprietor of white2tea begging him to release the tea on the website for regular purchase, and not just as part of the tea club, and he told me to have a little patience, which was hard.
I was not sure what to expect the second (well, nineteenth—I did finish off that pack of orchid heart the first time, and the one I got after that) time around, now that I have three more years of tea experience under my belt.
One of the things about flavor and scent is that it is instantly transportive. The smell of this tea reminds me of that early March morning when I had my first rock oolong, as if time is short circuiting and these two moments are connected. The tea is minerally, and then sweet, and the name—“orchid heart”—seems all too apt, as there is an almost floral sweetness about the tea, one that reminds me of the taste of orchids. (If you did not know this: orchids are generally edible, and in some parts of the world are affirmatively eaten as part of food—so if they are served to you as a garnish, you can eat them! I do!)
Most of all, though, this tea feels like a piece of calm in a cup, and if you know what times are like right now, calm is worth every minute you can spare.
It has been almost a year since Pele passed away, and I miss him tremendously. I am still very sad about his passing. After he passed away, I knew I needed to work hard to get my book out, and so I did and then I climbed Mt. Fuji and there was an election and things have been…like this. I tried to stay in touch with my emotions for a few months after his death, but it turns out that staying in touch with your emotions is a continual process and not a “there, I did it, now I'm done” kind of thing. Rude.
It is not surprising, when I put all these things together, that my brain has been distracted and unfocused.
It is very hard to transition from going on walks with someone, hugging someone, petting someone, every day of your life to just…not. The grief is always there beneath the surface, and it needs more acknowledgement. I cannot push through it, and I have tried; I need to make room for it, so there is room for everything else, too.
Reminding myself of my feelings is not all grief. There is a lot of joy in there, too. A lot of good memory. A lot of things that made me deeply happy, and I can remember those things and smile and feel lucky to have had that memory.
A few weeks ago, we planted a serviceberry in the yard with a sprinkling of Pele's ashes (we are still sprinkling his ashes). I have finally let myself go back through photos of Pele. I made fun of me for having my entire camera roll be dog photos, but it's so nice to have them now. Some of the photos do make me cry. Some of them make me laugh. Some of them do both. So I'm trying not to hide from my feelings anymore. I have been trying to make a practice of reconnecting with my feelings: grief, love, warmth. I have been trying to remind myself of the many ways in which I am a whole person, and it has been helping a lot with everything.
Here is Pele's serviceberry. We had to put a cage around it so that it could grow big enough to withstand the depredations of the Extremely Overzealous bunnies that populate our yard. The last time we tried to plant a very small serviceberry, it was beaten up by the bunnies and every so often it would produce a single leaf and then the bunnies would eat that, too.
We brought Pele home on the day that my agent called me to tell me about the first offer on my book; the thing I have been trying to work on now is the last thing that I worked on with him around. I thought, around July, when I had the first draft, that it would take me a few months to get ready for publication. Part of the reason it hasn't is that it's a much longer book (it used to be a little novella, ha ha ha) than I intended. But I think another part is that this is the last time Pele will be in the acknowledgements as my faithful, diligent helper. I'm not sure how much I've been holding onto this book because of that, but I had to go back and actually feel my feelings about him before I finally started having writing days where I was focused and I felt like the thing I was writing was good and that I was not a complete failure at everything I was doing.
I know there are people who are able to put those things aside and proceed with their lives. I am not one of them. I cannot just “get by” on most things. In order for me to function as a human being, I need to keep myself grounded and connected. I have periods where things do not function, and if they do not function, everything falls apart.
My brain will not just push through; it forces me to find joy and acknowledge pain. And this is both my biggest weakness and my greatest blessing.
So anyway, here I am. I still have a lot of big feelings about a not-very big dog, but I'm moving forward again.
This month's tip jar donation bonus is three of my all-time favorite photos of Pele. Please note that I have about seven hundred all-time favorite photos.
This tip jar will not bother you every week. Please don't donate unless you have spare cash and nothing to do with it, and/or you really want to see pictures of Pele.
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