Green: Impermanence and Rebirth

"Green was the silence, wet was the light,

the month of June trembled like a butterfly."

-- Pablo Neruda

It is difficult to contain green. The keen, mossy smell of spring--the unstoppable vines and weeds, new grass sprouting even in a concrete curbway, the explosion of green leaves after the flowering of deciduous trees. It is the color of the tea plant, itself an evergreen. The reason tea and so many plants are green is because their chlorophyll content absorbs blue and red light--reflecting the unnecessary green back to us. Being so abundant in spring, green is a reminder that all this so slick with rain and new life, is itself a cycle and impermanent.

There have been world altering changes since our Togetherness release last November. To plainly ignore them would be insincere. These are troubling times. Keeping it strictly tea, you may have heard something of the growing Matcha Crisis. You may also have heard something of the tariffs and trade wars, of which, tea producing nations are disproportionately affected. Each of the teas in this release come from countries impacted by tariffs. Everything about our business and our peers' business (especially in coffee) has become substantially more difficult in the year 2025. The chaos and the clamor of the world rings in our ears even as the tender greenness of spring flushes here and in the Tea Lands.

To understand the chaos and disorder we live in, where there are no answers; no brave knights; no great law; nothing come to save us--it helps to pull back for the long view. We, like the tea plant, are lodged inescapably in our materiality. We grow and we decay. Impermanence is one of the sacred values of zen and wabi sabi itself is "a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" It is about the acceptance of the inevitable and an appreciation of the grander cosmic order. Things that grow, decay, weather, wear, patina, scar, and blemish are beautiful because they remind us of the impermanence of materiality. Getting rid of all that is unnecessary. In wabi sabi, nothingness is not emptiness, rather it is alive with possibility. Wabi sabi is grounded in the idea that things are either devolving toward or evolving from nothingness." In metaphysics, it is held that the universe is in constant motion toward or away from potential. It is this movement which creates change and emergence. Perfection is dead in advance.   

"The cup is beautiful because it can break."

-- Zen proverb

For most cultures, the awesome power of nature lies at the heart of "green." The Chinese character lǜ 绿, (used for green tea) is composed from the radical which means "grass" (as is the character for tea). However, the more poetic term for "green" Qing stems from Proto-Sino Tibetan *s-riŋ ~ s-r(j)aŋmeaning "to live," "to give birth," and "to be alive." Beyond its color-related meanings, 青 qīng also carries symbolic meanings of youth, spring, and growth, often used to describe something fresh, vigorous, and full of potential. The Shiming defines qing as 'birth'. The word 青春 qīngchūn, literally "green spring", means "youth" in Chinese.

The color green can be a bit jarring when seen outside of nature. It's not easy being green. Its "unnatural" presence somewhere, particularly the brighter shades (like the toxic Scheele's Green made from arsenic) can be alarming. Look up chrome oxide green and you'll see a powder that looks uncannily like matcha, while cobalt green and bronze verdigris suggest impermanence all of their own. Where does green belong? We now know that green is one of the "easiest" colors for humans to see, even at a distance, because of its short wavelength. It's one of the reasons traffic lights are green--the other being that psychologists found green to be associated with safety and comfort--and thus an affirmation and a symbol to proceed. Pioneering abstract artist and color theorist Wassily Kandinsky called green "the most restful color that exists," a symbol of balance that seeks "depth and repose." He also called it "the most uninteresting color" and is not alone in his struggle with green's unremarkable, even boring abundance during warm seasons, what Maggie Nelson calls "the tyranny of the green world." Both Kandinsky and Nelson later warmed to the color. 

The Lunar Year of the Snake arrives as old, rotted and false skin clings to us. Potential dares us forward. No one knows what new form awaits them and therein lies our hesitancy, where conscience makes cowards of us all. But to those who brave being born, new life awaits. You must shed. Rebirth is necessarily painful. The snake is the perfect guide: never fearing--just molting. Look past the Judeo-Christian associations of the snake (a manipulator, seductor, liar, fork-tongued etc.) to more ancient understandings and you find the snake as an almost universal symbol of wisdom, of truth, intuition, mystery and renewal; transformation, introspection, and intentional growth. 

Just as tea inspires the innermost vital breath (see: our namesake), and Kundalini espouses that the snake is primordial cosmic energy contained within each of us--dormant potential--rising upward from the base of the spine, the Year of the Wood Snake is all about potential, growth, and being firm--but flexible when absolutely necessary. The Ancient Egyptians revered the color green for this reason: it symbolized renewal and rebirth--just as the floods of the Nile created new green papyrus yields each year. "Strong trees still sway," the old wisdom says.

Green is a test. It reminds us that we are caught in a mortal trap: time is undefeated, and the decay of all things is inevitable. In the David Lowery film based on the Arthurian legend The Green Knight Arthur asks a reluctant and indifferent Gawain, "It is wrong to want greatness for you?" In the myth, the unproven (green?) novice Gawain accepts a cryptic challenge from the Green Knight (himself a symbol of the Green Man, or Nature's cyclical and indifferent inevitability): which seems simple, but involves a series of reality-bending tests of moral fabric and knightly virtue and ultimately must cost Gawain his life, even if he succeeds. In the film and myth, greatness belongs to the one who contends with the immense, mysterious and green challenges beyond the horizon of our rules, structures and systems. That is why it's heroic. It is exactly at the threshold of chaos and decay that rebirth begins--a symbol for springtime, for snakes, tea, and of course, embodied by green.

It is not possible to evade time, human folly, or the disordering of all things. Entropy, to an extent, must be allowed, because it seeds creation. The messy state of our world often leaves one sympathetic to burning it all down! But entropy is not the villain just as death is not "evil." We simply see a part of the cycle and become fixated. "We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it's forever." Green decays and persists at the same time. Green is the ultimate balance and repose, admitting and attuning to a greater rhythm.

Besides, we can't always live in ever-spiraling chaos, can we? The philosopher and neuroscientist Karl Friston once modeled human consciousness as a predictive machine attempting to minimize entropy. This too is about balance. A little disintegration is good for us. Our brain needs uncertainty and novelty to grow. In Friston's model, too much order and structure breeds boredom, while too much chaos stokes panic. But with just the right amount of entropy, insight is gained. To gain deep, real and intuitive understanding you sometimes must shed the old ways, completing metamorphosis from a green chrysalis. Just when you feel lost in the blur of things falling apart, remember that this is also the grounds of creation, of potential, of becoming. Smallness, obscurity, a desire for sheltered peace, and even harmony itself are sometimes conniving security blankets against achieving something great and the creation of something fundamentally different than the world we live in: something better.