Observation #10: Camellia
On being awake to it
Last week I bought a ceramic mug to make matcha in. I used to make a matcha latte most mornings when I lived in the city, mornings I spent at home. I made a ritual of it—scooping the powder, heating the water, whisking it together into a green froth. Adding oat milk, cleaning the bamboo whisk, restoring each object to its place. I liked how it made me deliberate, how I had to slow down for each step. I liked how I gradually wakened with the ritual, and then with the first sip I was awake.
I started drinking less in the summer of 2022; I started drinking not at all that December. Soon I will have gone a full year without alcohol.
There are many reasons why I started drinking less, but just one as to why I kept going, which was that even if I did not like myself any more or less without alcohol, when I didn’t drink, I knew that every emotion I felt came from within me and not from somewhere else. In an essay I began at the time, I wrote: “Clarity feels like both a lens and a weight. Ordinary within my own life, I have pledged, though I didn’t know I was pledging, to feel everything.”
I didn’t realize how much everything would feel until I allowed myself to feel it; I didn’t realize how thoroughly I was numbing myself to the world until I was bare to it. Awake for it.
At my first office job in the city nine years ago, at a nonprofit loosely aligned with the labor movement but failing under toxic leadership, I drank with my coworkers to avoid admitting how pointless everything felt. When I left that job and eventually started working in anti-violence, I drank with my coworkers, again, to numb myself to the awareness of the intense, unstoppable suffering all around us. When my first adult relationship was nearing its end, I drank because it allowed me to be irresponsible, to pick fights, to say the things that I was too cowardly to say. I was in pain; I wanted not to feel nothing, but to not feel at all.
I have been thinking about what it means to feel everything. I look at that line I wrote fifteen months ago and imagine that clarity as a kind of clear, heavy stone, pressing down, sharpening my vision, distilling my thoughts.
A lens and a weight.
When I wake now, sometimes as early as 5 am, the first thing I do is light incense for the kitchen altar we have set up on a shelf. The second thing I do is make tea.
Matcha, like nearly every other tea, is harvested from the leaves of Camellia sinensis, a small, evergreen tree. What differentiates matcha from other green teas is that it’s made from plants that have been grown in the shade. The types of tea are almost innumerably various, depending on cultivation, preparation, and processing, but nearly all of it comes from one species, C. sinensis. The variations that we think of when we think of the myriad kinds of tea are cultivars, not distinct species, akin to how roses are cultivated for their fragrance or their showy blooms.
Camellia sinensis has glossy green leaves which come to a point and small flowers that are yellow-white. Young camellia leaves are light green and tender, with downy hairs on the underside; older leaves are thicker and a deeper green. If left to grow freely, camellia becomes a tree; for tea production, most plants are trimmed and kept as shrubs. When I tap the matcha powder into my cup—grass green, bright green, neon green—sometimes I forget that it came from a tree. As well as C. sinensis, there are hundreds of flowering plants in the genus Camellia; all are native to Asia. Many camellias are ornamental, with flowers that range in color from white to pink to red.
I was in Tokyo earlier this year—it feels so long ago now—visiting my friend Amina. I had a free afternoon; I’m not sure now why, but I went to the Nezu museum on my own. It rained that day. I went through the exhibits, where several eras of Japanese ceramics were on display, and then I went outside to the garden.
On my phone there are five videos of the rain—dropping into ponds, slipping off the edge of a tiled roof—and many pictures of the gardens. I saw a grey heron, its head tucked against its body. Koi in a neighboring pond, swimming placidly. And quivering with water, petals neat and many-layered, were camellias, pink as candy.
When I quit drinking, I wanted to stop using drinking as an excuse to do things that I didn’t want to take responsibility for. And. I wanted to know how it would feel to always be that way, to not be numb, which has become this way, which is to say, perfectly clear, which is the name of a James Turrell piece I stood inside for ten minutes last fall.
Walking around the garden, I wanted some kind of narrative. I wanted the strings, the orchestral music that would declare that something was happening. But there was no coherence. I got rained on. A few hours later I met up with Amina and we went to look at some photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans. I was in the world; we were in the world together. I was awake.
I have been thinking about what it means to be awake and alive to this moment, the moment we are living through. Every time I open my phone I’m almost immediately sucked into a vortex of news and posts and information and misinformation about what’s happening in Gaza. I feel my body freezing, my posture cramped and tense. My fingertips and toes have grown cold. And when I rise to get on with my day—to get on with it, as though such tremendous suffering can ever be ignored—I feel myself growing numb. The only other option seems to be anger, to become inflamed with rage at those who seem to think that dying from bombs is a normative way to die—if you’re not from here. If you’re not white.
I am trying not to be numb. I am trying to be awake to it—to the intense and variable feeling of being aware and bearing witness. Sometimes the anger feels like it will overtake me; other days, despair. Because I am afraid to make room for it I make myself numb to it. But I cannot continue to live like that; none of us can. Grieving and mourning and yes, allowing that rage—all of this is what makes us human and allows us to act. I have avoided the profundity of a realization because I wanted to dull the pain of that same realization, and in doing so, postponed my own action.
What would it mean to be awake to our moral responsibility and to the interconnectedness of the world? To know that the thousands of deaths abroad are felt, are being felt, are resounding through our own lives? What would it mean to acknowledge that my liberation is entwined with yours, and yours with mine, and ours with theirs, whoever they may be? That we must care for each other?
I am still making my tea slowly each morning, trying to adhere to the ritual of it. I’m thinking about how many others have done the same as I do each day, waking and heating water, sitting down to tea. With mint, with lemon, with sage. A few days ago—or was it weeks ago—I saw a video from Palestine, where a journalist there mentioned that even through bombings, even in the midst of war, people still need their tea. May all those suffering from the violence of this genocide find rest and ease soon. May they sit down with their families for tea.
If you are in the US, I encourage you to contact your representatives via fax or email and call for a ceasefire. Consider looking into how you can participate in the BDS movement, and if you occupy a position of power in the culture industry, get your institution to sign onto PACBI. In times of crisis and pain, it’s especially important to take care of ourselves and of each other—look out for your friends and neighbors close to home as well as abroad.
Till soon,
LP
1: This week’s letter is coming a day late, thanks for bearing with me!
2: Temperature check: I am considering switching from biweekly to weekly letters in the new year, with two/three paid and one free each month, but want to be mindful of your inboxes—feel free to leave a comment or email reply letting me know if that’s something you would be interested in!
I just found your newsletter and wow am I glad I did. I agree with the other comments, will absolutely keep reading!
I’d be down for more newsletters!