making time for tea
As I sip my tea this morning, I am faced with the message "say it straight, simple and with a smile" on the tag. My morning is often accompanied by thoughts like these or single words like "listen" and "enjoy." Though I often laugh it off, sometimes I cannot help but ponder the text as I sit. Why is my tea talking to me? Tea has always been thought to give messages through its leaves. Perhaps these little tags are meant to be an iteration of this tradition. Coffee does not talk. Rather, we grind it and hide it in a machine, absent from our finished product. Tea, on the other hand, we often let sit far beyond its advised amount of time. It dwells with us. We watch its leaves unfurl or the color change as the bag penetrates the water. And we are mesmerized. By giving us something to read, tea forces us to slow down and have a moment, if only for a moment.
America is a coffee culture. After all, we "run on Dunkin." What exactly does that phrase mean? That we are constantly on the move, needing to quickly get from one place to another, to quickly perform and produce, to stay awake. And we need caffeine and sugar to do that. Even coffee houses are often centers of productivity, and the beverages are just sweeter or more potent iterations of the same bean.