Sometimes, you just really want a delicate sheng pu-er, a tea that doesn't have a lot of scratchiness. Sometimes you want to sit with a tea and let all the frustration and rage you're feeling, and then exhale and let it go so you can get something done.

 

This is a great tea for that. There's a sweetness and a delicacy to the flavor. I actually got this teacake several years ago (it's a 2021 version that is no longer on their site), and it's been aging for a bit. At this point, a few years later, the tea hits it out of the park.

 

I don't often talk about how I purchase tea, but it is incredibly important. The purchase of tea has an ugly, bloody history. People have been killed and subjugated; wars have been declared. So I try to purchase from people who work directly with individual tea farmers and tea masters, who know who they are purchasing tea from, and who are trying to be fair and just.

 

So I just want to say that I like purchasing from Verdant Tea. They don't just tell you about the tea; they tell you about the family that produced it: how long have they been producing? How old are their tea bushes and/or trees? They work with workers cooperatives and families and individual artists who make their tea ware, and it gives me joy to know that they care about the community.

 

So it also gave me joy when they sent a newsletter earlier this week saying that they would be closed on today, Friday, January 23rd, because they are based in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, and they are participating in the general strike in the area in order to support their community.

 

This tea tasted sweeter, knowing that it was supporting people who are a part of many communities: the one they live in, the global community of tea, the community of human beings who make the world a better place.

The exact tea I got is no longer available for purchase, but there are some similar teas still available. You can get 2023 zun qianjiazhai as both a mini tea cake and full tea cakes (100g, 352 g) from Verdant Tea here. You can also buy this as loose leaf sheng pu-er from 2024 here.

 

Verdant Tea also has some of my favorite teas ever: the amazing green-tea processed herbal teas that showcase green tea methods used on non-caffeinated other teas.

My oldest sister is a climate scientist, and in some ways, that can be depressing, because--well--anyway, let's not get into that. In many ways, she is also the most climate-optimistic person I know. It's not that she doesn't know where the world is going, or that she's fearful of what will happen. It's that as part of her work she is on the ground, working with people on projects large and small, and she sees what is happening.

 

She is the one who has made me believe that climate optimism--even in the face of the world we live in--is possible, that human care and creativity can transform the world, even as we watch cruelty take center stage.

 

It was kind of a surprise to me when we spoke this last weekend and I found out that I was the optimistic one about what is happening in our country. It's not that I think that everything is fine; I am acutely aware of every way in which things are going to shit. It's just that the more I do, the more I see what is being done. I see how hard people are fighting, and I see that we can win. That has been fueling my optimism in a very, very dark time.

 

For me, optimism is not merely a matter of outlook. It is an outgrowth of what I do, who I am involved with. If there's an area where I'm not involved, all I see is the nothing being done that surrounds me. Being involved means manufacturing hope, not just for the people around you, but for yourself.

 

The Chicago Sun-Times wrote a profile of the loose federation of 3D printing enthusiasts I've been working with. As the article says, we've collectively put over 150,000 whistles in the hands of community members, and we are scaling rapidly.

 

We're just a bunch of people that saw that people were running out of whistles and started printing, and then started figuring out other people to talk to, and so on. But the act of doing so connects us with organizers, with people delivering mutual aid. It is a source of hope for me, and it keeps me grounded in times when the ground feels like it will disappear out from under me.

 

I still feel angry. I still feel sad. But I don't feel helpless, because I am helping. And that matters.

If you need whistles, or you have a 3D printer and want to help us print whistles, send an email to whistlerequests@proton.me and we will send you between 100 to 1000 whistles, absolutely free, or we will help you send other people whistles.

If you're able, we also have a linktr.ee where you can donate to the gofundme that helps pay for shipping costs. We also have a list of Amazon wishlists that are used to keep our individual printers purchase 3d-printing filament.

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