Sunday Sessions — Pu-Erh Tea — Dissolving Walls

the session, before

— Victoria

Pu-Erh tea is often encountered slowly — not as flavor, but as atmosphere. This session unfolded in that register.

My guest and I sat facing opposite directions. We interacted when appropriate, but more often sat quietly — eyes closed, or half-resting on whatever happened to be in view. Spacing out. Communing with the invisible.

In my case, that view was a well-weathered brick wall, its surface softened by time — calcium deposits washed and re-washed by rain. At one point I remarked that if the wall began to melt, this would be confirmation that we had arrived at a good place in the session.

My guest faced the harbour — or what would have been the harbour, were it not for the backsides of the Union Club and the Hotel Empress, two stalwarts of the Victoria skyline. Though unseen, the harbour was felt, and seemed to play a role in what followed.

After a long silence, my guest said that just as the second tea was first poured, a blue patch opened in the rainy sky. A shaft of light passed through it and fell directly in his line of sight. I suggested this was an entirely appropriate response from the natural world, as we were drinking a tea of extreme rarity and grace.

This was a tea difficult to perceive in groups — amid traffic, chatter, or distraction. Neither of us could be accused of being overly talkative that day, and so the tea seemed to rise to meet us.

We can prepare the room. Ultimately, it is the tea that decides how it will enter — if it enters at all.

The anthropomorphizing of tea is sometimes dismissed as fantasy or delusion, and it is usually best left out of discussion. It cannot be explained in a way that satisfies. I mention it only as reassurance for those who encounter this experience and wonder if they are imagining things.

They are — no more so than the world itself is the product of imagination. It both is and is not.

What I will say is this: if you reach a point in a tea session where you briefly wonder whether you are influencing the weather with your mind — and then question your own sanity — this is, in fact, a very good sign. You may at last have found the tea you were searching for.

The sun set that day, but the feeling lingered — a subtle pulse in the body. We do not participate in such sessions to learn so much as to remember. We tune the body and mind until the feeling carries us for weeks, until the next meeting with a tea capable of folding memory, thought, and experience into a single moment — both in time, and seemingly outside it.

A tea will show itself differently depending on time, place, weather, and the people present. This once struck me as strange. The strangeness has not worn off, though it has become something I now quietly expect — or at least allow for.

Tea from this session:

dirt 1983

$100.00

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