Kathleen's Blog

I would like to also dedicate this blog to four people:

My roommate-who helped me out of the mire of today, gave me this topic, and who always accepts my offers of tea, no matter what flavor it is…..

My brother, who has always tolerated my visits to tea shops and bought me some fine teas

To my father-who first brought me the gifts of tea and perseverance

And my mother
Who always was there to make that cup of tea and give that needed hug when I needed them most

~K

“A world without tea is a world without hope.”
~on a Boston t-shirt

Hello dear Hearts!
Today I’ve decided to write about a subject so dear to me that I believe without it, I should cease to exist in the warm eves of my dorm room-and this subject, dear hearts, is tea. If only there were a Muse of Tea, I could hail, I would call upon her to sing its merits, and to inspire me with the proper words to describe my deep, unending passion, for the succulent dried leaves whose tantalizing myriad scents waft lovingly and comforting in the warm wooded eves of my room, as the winds blows coldly outside among the trees……

Maybe I won’t call on the Muse…..

Now, to understand how teas has changed my life, you are going to need what English lovers might call, a setting.

Voila!

It was a dark and stormy night, the type of night in which the gods can be heard murmuring prophecies in the wind throughout the trees, trees which are brittle and whose leaves fall with the secret utterings each deity whispers. And, in the house amidst these trees……I was sitting in the warm red library reading King Lear(at three AM in the morning, after a rather out of whack week). If you have ever read King Lear, you will know that it’s a LITTLE BIT TRAGIC. And, as I have a fairly overactive imagination and emotional sensitivity to harm induced upon others, I can recall becoming more and more depressed. We begin, after all, with a King who has made his tragic mistake BEFORE the script begins and we end with Gloucester, one of his subjects brutally blinded and later dead, and Lear himself holding the one daughter who truly loves him, Cordelia, dead in his arms. And this, all on my birthday……..

Happy birthday to me?

The very descriptive scene of Gloucester’s eyes being plucked out, I must admit, particularly left me in a bit of a funk. Yet, in the midst of reading a brutal eye-plucking scene and weeping over a blinded man and a dying king holding his dead daughter, I was actually having a cup of tea, and I found that, as I began to feel upset, I would drink the tea, and suddenly Gloucester‘s blinding seemed more like a gentle slap in the face. How comforting it was to know that I had a cup of tea to sip just when the reading became almost unbearable!

This is how a good cup of tea has always been for me. When I see to be in the worst throes of woe or stress, off I hop to my boiler and brew some tea, and, just like Aldous Huxley’s soma in Brave New World, my worries are pushed aside, if only for a moment. Tea is always there when I need it most, Just as it was tea when I studied for the test on this very play, and just about now, when I type this blog and sit here wondering when I shall collapse on my computer and weep over the dissolution I have created for myself.

And, as I drink my tea now, I remember a little phrase my father told me a few weeks ago when I thought the world was going to dissolve the first time. And, yes, I promise, the phrase is related to the merits of tea.

A few weeks back, I was having what doctors medically call, “an acute stress reaction.” I also call it , “I’m panicking, and I can’t vent my panic, so I’m going to call my father and tell him I’m panicking.-this is abbreviated HELP(Hellish Entropy’s Leading Palpitations)”

And yes, for those who are concerned about the meaning of entropy, this is what dictionary.com effectively states as one definition-

“a doctrine of inevitable social decline and degeneration”

I was declining rapidly.

Therefore, what do we do when we are declining rapidly? We call the people who we know who will listen to us and help us even when we act stupidly-we call our parents.

And sure enough, my poor father was on the receiving end.

I would say the exchange went something like this:

“Hello baby!-How are you?”

Well sir, I don’t know.”

What’s wrong”

Well………….SXFNDNJFXDNTEHTDSZBSDAVADVSCCCASNBDJFNC BADDAY AND I FAILED TO WAKE UP DHTDTJNDJJRYJRJGNXFBSDSVWHEREBY I BEGANB TO FEEL ILLSDFGSGSGSDGSVBVXTO MOMENTS OF MANIC OBSESSIVEBEHAVIORSFJMFHTSDVCSSELFDTHNFDBHDFBIMMOLATIONDHNGDSFGGBSFGFG>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>WHAT DO I DO?

(This quote is not a paraphrase…..)

It is amazing how profound a father can be when pushed to answer. He simply replied

Dear-have a cup of tea and carry on.”

Leaving me stunned

What kind of advice was this?

I drink tea all of the time, and how could continuing to drink it solve my problems? Was this metaphorical?

Could I simply have a cup of tea and carry on?

Suddenly, it was if my eyes had been plucked out, and suddenly my mind’s eye was seeing the truth–he was right.

It has always been true that on my worst days, tea has somehow helped me pull through. When I am depressed, I have tea. When I am tired, I drink tea. When I can’t focus my thoughts for a blog, I have tea, and when I need an effective paper or blog topic, I have tea.

Tea for me is a routine. It is a form of bonding with others(I offer tea as a peace pipe to my enemies, just as I offer it to those I love), it is a comfort when I feel depressed and upset, it calms me when I am anxious, and sometimes, just sometimes, it reminds me of the fact that I am human, I make mistakes, but that, like the tea bag, I must always hold onto the string that anchors me to my little cup of a world to wake up to another day, no matter what type of obstacles may await me.

Converse, too, has become this little teacup of a world for me, and sometimes when I feel I am stuck, I just throw in some of my finest brew(which at the moment is a sweet wild orange Tazo brew), and swirl it around until the world, like that fine cup of tea, seems a little sunnier. Then, as I realize that maybe I’ll pull through King Lear and my own personal blindness, I remember my father’s phrase, and I think to myself-”I think this might be my cup of tea.”

Just maybe…..

“Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day – like writing a poem or saying a prayer.”

~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Hello Dear Hearts!
Alas, we meet again, and I haven’t fulfilled my promises to be controversial .I will admit I am working on a hopeful tour-de-force blog on Occupy Wall-Street, a movement which horrifies and appalls me, but, in an effort to stall so that I can compose my thoughts for the subject, I want to address something many of you may not address in your daily lives. It has to do with what Miss Lindbergh said. When I stumbled across this quote, I couldn’t help but feel an incredible sense of surprise and happiness, as this quote directly applies to me and will hopefully, in time, apply to some of you at Converse.

I am not sure if any of you ever possessed an odd love for a particular hobby or object. I once had a friend, for example, who loved butterfly wings she found lying on the road, or, in some particularly tragic though advantageous cases, wings caught in the front grills of cars. Yes, perhaps it seems peculiar, but for I assure you we all have held these peculiar tastes for oddities or odd habits. I myself had many of these odd loves in the past, but one which has never left me is the love or flowers. Since I was fairly young, I have always loved to collect (and many times dry) flowers that I have found very exotic or beautiful. This is not to say that my dried flowers have survived or even that I have catalogued them in a handy scrap book which I show to all of my family members(which would be slightly odd, I suppose). But I have always loved flowers with a secret passion, and it has always pleased me not only to receive them from others, also to arrange them. There is something so beautiful to me about holding and assimilating something so ephemeral, and knowing that, if only for a moment, you can enjoy the fruits of the labor, the juxtaposition of the different colors and textures that you gathered. It is as if, in that minute after you have placed them all in an old mug, you are separated from whatever reality has tossed at you and that you have added some new exotic color to your dorm room or anywhere else for that matter.

And you say, what’s the point of this blabber?

Frequently in my blog, I fell sort of pressured toward telling others how they can establish a routine, or how they can navigate college life, or life in general, and yet, I’ve come to realize(yes, dear hearts, prepare yourself!), I am not really perfect at any of those things. I am dreadfully unorganized, the word routine is not in my dictionary, and the most courageous thing I really have ever done was killing a cockroach on my own. Oh, and maybe coming to Converse of my own volition…..J J But all of these areas of advice seem devoid of passion, somehow without a sense of emotional and spiritual depth. They link us to a fast paced world, where people, like supply lines and hybrid Toyotas, rush by, unemotional, ever moving….

And yet, I’ve noticed that from the time I was small and at home arranging camellias in my mother’s room to the time I spend arranging hydrangeas in my dorm room, picking and arranging flowers seems to take me back and return me to the real world. Somehow, I can, at Converse, pass the tea olive and the roses, and know that beyond the stress of day-to-day academics, there is something deeper and sweeter blooming. There is a wave of nostalgia that pervades as I pass sweet Osmanthus, and I can remember fine family memories and who I am when I pass those flowers. Like the tea that I dearly love to drink, those flowers link me to something brighter, something calmer, and something sweeter. Just as my friend linked those crushed butterfly wings to something vibrant and beautiful, so too I can link the hydrangeas with my roommate and the laughs we share, my mother and the joyful evenings we shared over good movies and stories, and even the promise of a brighter tomorrow and the presence of God Himself.

And yes, flowers also remind me of the bittersweet events in my life, events which too have sculpted who I am. I am finally reminded of a sad event that happened a few weeks ago in my life. My friend’s grandmother passed away. I remembered her as a beautiful vivacious Southern lady, welcoming even as her mind began to fail, and when she passed form this world to the next, I tried to imagine what to send to the family to express my condolences. I eventually decided to send a bouquet of purple iris, the flower for which she herself was named. And, as I ordered those beautiful irises, I wanted an expression to quite with it, and this was the message I chose:

Thou art the Iris, fair among the fairest,
Who, armed with golden rod
And winged with the celestial azure, bearest
The message of some God.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

I cannot help but think today, as I sit looking at the dried hydrangeas in my room, that my odd little quirk might also be a quirk you might enjoy too. For indeed, you may just find that, hidden the folds of those petals, is the message of some God and some love that will sustain you.

Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity. ~John Ruskin
The flower offered of itself
And eloquently spoke
Of Gods
In languages of rainbows
Perfumes
And secret silence…
~Phillip Pulfrey, from Love, Abstraction and other Speculations