Small Mercies
On certain days that are dark and hard, as well as some days that are bright and easy, I pour British-style tea1, Earl Gray or cardamom black or blackcurrant, from a Japanese ceramic teapot glazed with irises into an English bone china teacup with gilt lip and painted flowers, of the kind one is pretty much certain to find for $3 at any Goodwill at any time.2 Then, because I live recklessly, I add a dash of whipping cream.
The cold white cream vanishes utterly into the amber liquid, as if it had never been.
One breath later, it blooms upward in pin-sized white flowers.
Another breath, the slightest shake of the cup, and the tea shows a stack of alternately translucent and opaque layers, like a cirrus-streaked sky or a summer sea.
At this point, it doesn’t matter much whether I drink the tea or not. It also does not matter as much that the ceiling is leaking, that various ships in one’s life have wrecked or gone adrift, or that the world is a hard and uncaring place, with a remnant of kind people in it, scattered like stars.
One can bear hard things more easily, given a drop of beauty.
I specify, because there are ~1.5 billion people on this planet who would have conniptions at the thought of mixing tieguanyin or pu’er or sencha with milk, and that is far too many enemies to make. Also, I’m one of them.
It strikes me that this, too, is magic.
I literally just poured myself a very milky peach-cardamom tea situation & am about to head out to the sunny balcony to sit with & sip & think or not think, whatever happens.
The same bloom comes every morning when I corrupt my coffee with creamer (a sin my past self would be horrified by; thankfully he was not prescient). I never actually wait long enough to see the layers; I wonder, after reading this, if they are there, and how much beauty I have missed out on by hurrying to take my coffee to the next task rather than looking at it.
And at the risk of alienating a different but also huge group of people, I enjoy a similar feeling when I'm smoking the occasional cigar, watching the whorls of smoke traveling up and around and thru each other. It is absolutely meditative and all the more beautiful for the ephemerality.