Tea with the Fox

Musings with Old Friends : III

A light tea with just a trace of sugar feeds more than a relaxation. It creates a transparency through the glass mug with a promise of clarity and straightforwardness. For centuries tea has been associated with a calm and a 

' just-so ' relation to issues that may have inspired the great treatise we know as Zen and the arts of ' shibumi.'

In a mind that's accustomed to the greatest strategic thinking and the wrap-around style of bringing the mind to relate to all issues it encounters, the tea sessions of Zen bring a sobriety to life's experience, where for a brief moment we stop ordering the world around and just take it as it comes.

I used to recall in my youth the way my mind can draw on a fact that I encounter, mix that with my imagination about possibilities and then persuade myself through the dream relation that this is what God intended. And it was a perfectly stable experience. Today I can pick out that same experience in the writings I encounter and the people I meet.

I had occasion to inquire into its organization especially after the experience became a little wieldy and difficult to manage. Besides it completely ignores any notion of what the individual is in the experience. Is the individual God? Man? Lucky? Or simply someone really smart and cute?

That explains the message in each of the faiths that persuades us to find God or come to realize who we are. It refers to the feeling of emptiness in us, like a void, loveless and in deep isolation from everything we may be in engagement with. Like a Cleopatra saying ' I seem to have just drifted along with everything I was doing.'

So we encounter the one question at the end of a long and varied career in life ... did we know what we were doing? It surprises us that such a question should even arise. So we dismiss it and we do it easily. But the emptiness turns us into a bee that cannot rest lest we come to admit in a tea session that we find ourselves empty.