The experience of endless

As I sat with my tea bowl and observed and tasted the changing colour, patterns and shape of the tea leaves, I thought about the patience and curiosity required for a true opening.

I often buy myself roses. Yes, I love the scent, but more than that I love watching the way the rose transforms from a pert bud into a blossoming beauty. It’s a process to open. Warmth, water, time.

I could buy flowers that are in full bloom, but then I’ll  miss the subtle stages that come prior to that. Ditto I can go to a cafe and order a brewed cup of tea but then I too miss the shifting flavours that come with each poured cup.

Tea ceremony has become a real practise of opening for me. The first time I went to a traditional tea sit, I fell straight into the ambience and meditative nature of the ritual, but I couldn’t finish all six bowls served. You’ve got to be joking, I thought! I stopped at three and just took a sip of the subsequent pours. I only realised afterwards that it was because I wasn’t seeing it as a process.

Now, just on one year into sitting, tea ceremony has become a potent ‘life’ practise. It’s not the only practise like this, but it’s one I really resonate with.

The little bowls are vessels. They are empty, then they are full. Over and over again. They receive and they let go. Over and over again. There is endless potential.

I’m becoming very aware of my relationship with the tea bowls and to the tea bowls. I, myself, a similar vessel.

As the full cup is placed in front of me, I reach for it in anticipation. The moments before taking my first sip of the sweet tea, the longing in that. The fullness of consuming it. And the returning of the empty cup.

There is something about becoming intimate with this process of receiving, filling up, emptying and letting go. To be at ease with all phases. It’s a metaphor for life.

It’s also teaching me the beauty in longing. There is no emptiness in it. Just a fullness to receive. No lack, but an invitation for expansion. The exquisiteness of life longing for itself.

And then there is the changing shape of the leaves. The more we open to life, the more it changes. No one pour, no one leaf ensemble is the same. Going deeper doesn’t make something stay static or get harder, actually it makes it transform into something else, something new, something different.

Tea ceremony, in its slow, steady, rhythmic way, like the roses and so much of what nature offers us, has become a way to open and experience the feeling of endless….