Ignore the tomatoes. I just washed four pounds of tomatoes from Costco because I’m making a huge batch of butter chicken simmer sauce to freeze for easy dinners, and I washed the tomatoes this morning but am not making the sauce until tonight.

 

I have done Honey Fairyland before, but today I found myself angry—the kind of deep anger that seems to seep out of my every pore, that seasons every word I read and every breath I take. I often get angry, but my temper is usually a flash in the pan: it hits, burns fast, and then goes away. 

 

But this anger has persisted for a while, and so I decided I needed an old favorite to help me calm down and collect what I was thinking. Honey Fairyland is a tea that is sweet, complex, and unusual—the kind of tea that I want to concentrate on as I drink it, to experience it—and so it’s a good tea to help me step back from my anger.

 

One of the reasons I like drinking tea is that for me, it is a meditation practice. I am bad at the kind of meditation where you sit and concentrate on something else. I took a whole weeks-long meditation class (to help with depression) and it was enormously helpful and life changing because I was deeply out of touch with my emotions, and one of the things I learned was that the meditation on the raisin and the walking meditations were easiest for me. 

 

So there are things that I do now that are meditation in the form that works best for my brain: drinking tea and thinking about it, going for a walk, qigong.

 

The point of meditation is not to suppress unwanted emotions: it is to be able to acknowledge them, to accept them as friends that are necessary for where we are in the world, and to understand that it is there for a reason and pretending it doesn’t exist is the opposite of meditation. Tea is a chance to sit with my emotions when they feel like they are so big that they will control me rather than just nudge me in the right direction; excellent tea helps me disrupt the feeling that the emotion is consuming me, because instead, I am consuming something else.

 

Honey Fairyland is an excellent tea. There isn’t a single wrong note in it—not something bitter, not something flat. It’s gorgeous from steep to steep, and it allows me to step back and examine the tea: the darker notes at the very bottom, the light, almost crisp, sweetness at the top, the feeling of sunshine on a fall day that is blustery and cloudy. The tea is the color of the golden-brown leaves on the trees outside: bit by bit, I remember that there is a world that is larger than my anger. I am a part of it, and here I am.

 

Tea drunk this way is never just tea: it is a part of an entire emotional system, a grounding experience that helps me understand who I am and why I am here. The experience of drinking the tea connects to every other time I have drunk it in an unbroken arc, and I know why I am here.

Honey Fairyland is an absolutely delightful tea that I got from Friday Afternoon Tea.

Tea is not an answer to anger, of course. It is an evaluation of it.

 

I am angry right now because I still have not gotten over Senate Democrats pushing the government into shutdown for forty days, leaving people hungry and scared and broke, and then caving without a single meaningful concession. 

 

“We will vote on that” is not a meaningful concession; it is a promise that they will say no again later. It’s more heartbreaking that the cave seems to have happened because the airline industries were worried about losing money, and that is apparently more important than people being able to afford healthcare, such as it is.

 

I am angry because the only reason I was able to become a full time author was because the ACA made it possible for me to guarantee myself health insurance, and I’m livid that this is another option that is being taken from the people. I am angry because it feels like we organized and helped people access food banks and mutual aid to get through the shutdown, and we didn’t get anything meaningful from it. 

 

I’m angry because it feels like some (but not all) Democrats are falling to a moral hazard: that is, they recognize that they will get support and funding as long as they are able to point to the very real dangers of fascism, and so there is no incentive for them to get rid of fascism; the existence of fascism makes their fundraising easy. I’m angry because I know it works on me, and because I feel manipulated, and because it makes me feel—at least temporarily—hopeless because I do not know how to defeat the fact that fundraising off fascism is so lucrative that some people will want to keep it around as a bogeyman.

 

This is the anger I have today, and sitting and drinking tea helps me parse this out into individual threads that range from fear to disgust to empathy to annoyance.

 

Anger is not a bad emotion, but being angry all the time is bad for your brain. This is something we know; it is something the fascists would like for us, because people who are always angry are in fight-or-flight mode, and our brains are designed to fight (or fly, or freeze) and not think when we are angry.

 

So it is important for me to acknowledge the anger: to give it space, to sit with it and hold its hand and listen to the message it is telling me. It is telling me that I don’t want people to suffer. That I want people to access health care. That I’m tired of politicians who lean heavily on what the other guy will do, and not enough on what they will do. I understand that options are limited when your party is in the minority, but if you have one option, you cannot squander it, and I am angry that it was squandered, that people suffered needlessly and that more will also suffer, needlessly.

 

Acknowledging the anger helps me see which path I need to take. Were my Senators in on it? On the one hand, they weren’t one of the defectors (this time). On the other hand, Hickenlooper said he wanted to be one of them and then realized that would make people really mad and he’s up for reelection this year, and he has voted for Trump nominees enough that I know who he is at this point.

 

And so this is where anger leads me: to determination, because the point of anger is not to linger, but to hand off to another emotion.

 

I want a senator who will fight. My senator won’t, and he’s up for reelection this year. 

 

I can do something about that.

 

Here we are at the end of my tea. My anger is still there, but it’s not clouding my head. It’s there to warm my determination when it flags, because the road is long and there is much to be done.

 

Let’s go.

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