Surprising as it may be, today was the first time I have had tea in about a week and a half. This tragedy occurred due to pure exhaustion, and in slight part laziness. Let me just say that as a grad student the end of the semester is looked upon almost with disdain especially when you have a thousand finals or so to help grade in only a couple of days. Once the finals were graded, I had decided I would take a break by going to visit my family for a week, and while packing, I was so tired I dreaded the decision practice which is actually quite laborious for us tea addicts.
"What teas will I want to drink in the next week? Believing those choices are true what is the least amount of teaware I can pack up to make that as enjoyable as drinking it at my own place? "
The shear thought of trying to decide and the extra trips out to the car were actually too exhausting in my already incredibly fatigued state, I decided that I could make do for a week of coffee for my caffeine fix. I quite missed my tea, and my teaware.
The photo above is part of me trying to bring a little more life into my tea sessions, this lovely orchid made my two tea sessions today quite enjoyable. There is something to be said for the Japanese practice of Ikebana, and while this was not a true set up as this was not a flower arrangement but rather a live blooming flower the added color, and additional life in the set up was great. Sadly the Baozhong I had after the Sencha did not live up to the setting.
Do any of my readers try to incorporate flowers into their tea set ups/ ceremonies?
5 comments:
Flowers, well, sometimes yes, but smaller ones. I prefer them to be the height of the tea pot, like african violets or small pelargonium. They do add colour and good mood to my tea time.
It's funny, I never thought about it much, for months now I've had a blooming Begonia, yellow, right next to where I set my tea cup while drinking it. When I drink tea in the other room, I sometimes have a vase of flowers near where I drink tea too. Now that you mention it I often pay a lot of attention to the flowers while drinking my tea...there is something nice about them.
I also went mostly without tea recently--for a week in Puerto Rico. Everything there was so different that I actually did not miss tea much, strange as it is, I was too busy absorbing all the craziness around me and juggling with travelling in an unfamiliar place where people's grasp of English was often only slightly better than my minimal grasp of Spanish.
That teapot looks awful familiar.
-bryan
Good to hear Mushitza and Alex, having flowers around really does brighten the mood.
Bryan, its a very small kyusu ( about 140ml) from Artistic nippon. I know Toru at AN has sold at least 3 other very similar ones at slightly different sizes. But its quickly become a common sight on my tea table.
I rarely have flowers near me while I'm having tea sessions. I don't know why, it's just that I usually am in close contests and between the tetsubin on the furo and the tea caddies and everything else I always didn't mind. From now on I am gonna have, even if small, always flowers on my tea desk. Today for example I had a Darjeeling Thurbo 1st flush 2012 in the morning, a Golden Nepalese in the afternoon and a perfect Kabusecha Kimigayo before going to sleep. Now I woke up and today I will start with a superb pu'erh cut from a cake from 1996.
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