I discovered this tea because I was looking for tea pets.

 

If you don‘t know what tea pets are, they’re little figurines (usually clay) that you pour tea on as part of a tea ceremony. What do they do when you pour tea on them? Well, the answer is generally nothing. Sometimes there are color changing ones, or ones you can prime to spit out water, but mostly they do nothing. The point of a tea pet is to be whimsical.

 

I do not own any tea pets, mostly because I have never seen one and thought, “wow, I absolutely need that.” (I think this often about tea cups and tea and other tea accessories.) My rationality has always kicked in and said, “Courtney, our storage room is limited; would you rather have a teacup or this thing you don’t really want?” And I’ve always answered it with full-throated teacup.

 

Nonetheless, it feels like a thing I should want. It’s a tea thing! How can I not want a tea thing? So I was googling unusual tea pets to see if maybe the issue was that I just hadn’t found the right one and this brought me to Jesse’s Teahouse, who does have some interesting and unusual tea things (and uh I did buy some brass tea coasters, thanks Jesse), including tea pets.

 

I did not buy the tea pets because it turns out that if you give me a choice between a tea pet that makes me say, “aw that’s cute” and a tea I’ve never had before, I’m going to pick the tea every single time.

 

Jesse’s Teahouse had a Tibetan dark tea. For those who don’t know, “dark” is a designation usually given to post-fermented teas like pu-erh or heicha. (As compared to “black” teas in the Western world, which are called “red” in China.)

 

So this is a post-fermented tea from Tibet. I have never had a Tibetan dark tea. The scent of this tea is amazing—it’s nutty, almost like a matcha, except it tastes nothing like a matcha. It tastes the way matcha smells, if that makes any sense: nutty and light and bright and wonderful.

 

I had a good time with this tea: seven steeps. It’s not as complex as some of the raw pu-erhs I’ve had, but it was very enjoyable.

I got this from Jesse’s Teahouse.

This is a story about the most irrational belief that I harbor. It is based on extremely flimsy evidence, at best, and yet I still continue to believe it.

 

This thing happened to me when I was seven. My parents lived in a house that stood at the edge of an arroyo, partway up a hill. We could see out onto a valley from my bedroom, which sounds cool except it was all city lights. One night, I went up to the bedroom by myself to get something, and I saw lights.

 

Not the normal lights: I saw three bright lights in a row. They looked like they were just over a neighbors’ house, and they were moving in a way that didn’t look like the helicopters or airplanes we usually saw.

 

I saw it and thought, “that’s a UFO.” For a second, I was terrified. And then, I felt like someone was speaking to me in my mind, and they said, “Don’t be scared. We don’t want to hurt you. We’re just here waiting.”

 

And I said, “waiting for what?”

 

And the voice in my head said, “for all of you to be ready.” And when they said this, I knew exactly what it meant. I‘m using words for all of this but none of the exchange happened in words. It was just big concepts, all at once.

 

So I went back downstairs and told my sisters I saw a UFO and they said, “no you didn’t” and reminded me that just because it didn’t follow the usual airplane paths didn’t mean it wasn’t an airplane or a weather balloon and you do remember we’re not THAT far from an air force base, right?

 

So I stopped telling people about it. 

 

I recognize that my sisters are probably right. I was a seven year old with an extraordinarily active imagination. We lived near an Air Force base. There are a million explanations that make more sense than the one that I believe, and I’m not going to insist that my explanation is true to someone else, because it does not make sense to me that a UFO would show up and say “hi, don’t be scared” to a seven-year-old child and not, like, world leaders.

 

Nonetheless, I have a very firm belief that there are aliens on this planet, that they do not mean us ill, and that the reason they are here is that they are waiting for us to develop intelligent life.

 

Now, some of you might be thinking, “wait a second, are we not intelligent life?” Others might be thinking that this might be kind of like the Star Trek thing where we have to develop a warp drive to be considered sufficiently advanced. 

 

But in that split second where I thought I was having this exchange with these aliens, I knew that the thing they were waiting for had nothing to do with technology. The aliens were waiting for us to stop hurting each other.

 

I don’t proselytize this belief because I don’t want to start a religion and you know, if you ask me honestly, I was a weird little child with a huge imagination and I have always wished for things like “world peace” and “end hunger,” from the time I was old enough to write things down. So if I was going to imagine aliens telling us anything, it was always going to be that we should be kind to each other. I don’t rationally think that there is any evidence that this ever happened.

 

I do, nonetheless, believe it.

 

When there were Congressional hearings where the DOD admitted that yes, there were UFOs and we interacted with them, I just shrugged, because I know that there are aliens here, and I know that they’re waiting for intelligent life to develop.

 

I mention this now not because I want other people to share this particular delusion, but because I hold onto it right now: that as far away as that future sounds, the aliens believed it was possible.

 

That has to be worth something in this moment, right?

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.