Tea Release: 10 Years: Begin Again

"The journey itself is home." -Basho

For whatever reason, things come in tens. Cycles are no exception. Though we passed the decade mark this summer, we decided to wait to celebrate. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, the moment blows right by you. Or worse, you find yourself perpetually staring down, freaking out about a distant goal, with no consolations except sweat and anxiety. Then when you get near, it's all too easy to move the goal posts--setting them further downfield--so that you never arrive. Certainly, the founders of Spirit hardly recognize our own lives ten years on--and that's a good thing. 

We celebrate and enshrine youthfulness as a culture--but I would argue just about everything (especially tea) gets better with age. The trouble is, we venerate youth for its beauty, vitality and carefree qualities so much so that we assume, at some arbitrary point, we're past our prime. The window has shut. Those big wishes from your twenties, what you dreamed of growing up to be, are now too far gone to be realized. Better settle in with a book and taxes (I don't know--what do old  people do?), bingo card and back pain and whittle away your twilight years of thirty and beyond.

In reality, all of us should be re-steeping. There's so much more to taste. It's never really over, and it's never too late. A lot of business advice mandates a "10-Year Plan." I think we forgot to make one because we weren't certain we'd be around in ten months. Selling expensive, impractical, orthodox tea leaves that don't carry zippy names, come in a bag, or tout health benefits put us at odds with just about everything in the market. We had no money, no warehouse, and no time (from working our day jobs) but we had a vivid vision of what tea culture in America could look like. If it was unclear how to get there, we knew what it looked like when it was achieved, we just never took the time to write it down.

Ten symbolizes the end of a cycle, but it also symbolizes the beginning of a new one. Though it's associated with the ultimate achievement, it is a number full of tension (no pun intended) and in our Western Arabic numerals, everything is base ten and powers of ten. The two digits, placed side by side, seem a contradiction: 1 is the beginning, the singular, the personal, the only, the prime; while 0 (itself a gift of ancient Indian mathematician Brahmagupta) is the void, the unknown, the threshold, absence, nothingness that implies every possible thing in the same way a blank page does. Why would they take this number, which symbolizes absence, and place it in the tens column as a second digit, to signify the next highest value, having completed the cycle?
 

Reckoning with all that's happened in a decade, it becomes increasingly clear that it's not the years, it's what they were filled with. Spirit may not have gained so much groundspeed if tea hadn't been so stagnant in the years preceding. We owe so much to our exact context: tea, its makers, our team, our city and the world. In 2015 there was essentially a stalemate wherein a very small handful of companies supplied most places Americans encountered tea. There was a staggering monoculture of what tea service looked like that was especially alarming in elevated culinary contexts and no one was challenging or pushing that definition. In some ways, a lot has changed since then. In others, we've barely budged.

In that sense, this release doesn't really symbolize the end of a cycle, nor completeness, nor wholeness. We haven't been counting the years like they were checkpoints on the way to ten, rather, watching the way as it unfolds before our feet. Every day feels like the first. We could not have grown this tree without first harvesting its seeds. Even now, we plant the seeds from the tree that will take ten years to bear them. Thelonious Monk told his bandmates, "A genius is the one most like himself."

There is no perfect cup of tea. There is only the tea you share with the person across the table from you. That should be any tea and could be any person. So what goes wrong seeking 10? On one extreme you have dissatisfaction, self sabotage, imposter syndrome and the creeping feeling that it's all for naught. On the other there's this endless striving, the "grind", the pursuit, never being satisfied and never having enough. Both leave you adrift, feeling like you'll never reach your destination. Both are dangerous. Just because there's more to climb, it doesn't mean you shouldn't appreciate the heights you've attained. It would be funny if it were not so horrific, just how absurd the idea of asking people to take time and slow down for a cup tea in our country is at this moment. And yet it's more eerily apt than you think. Take any point of this humble leaf's history and you'll find the darkest impulses of humanity right there alongside it. Tea exists not in spite of, but because of, humanity. No beverage will be sipped more today on planet earth and yet within all our contradictory multitudes and attitudes, humanity is interwoven, its pages riven by the humble camellia.

Remember that something does not have to have practical purpose. It doesn't have to profit. Nor does it have to make sense. Tea is not these things. It defies being stuffed in neat packaging (just ask our mighty production team). Spirit did not survive ten years because it was a "good business idea," nor did it start with "you know where there's a huge hole in the market…" or "we should start an import/export company." All of the riches we possess are in our community, the people we get to work with, the teas in our compendium, and the little, unexpected delights. In the scheme of our market, we are the luckiest ones. We get to see the whole story and for the most part, we're the only ones who do. The places where tea grows, the people growing it, the makers and markets, the folks on our team who package and sell it, and the industry professionals and customers who sip it. We believe in tea. It's bigger than tea. We only hope, in some small way, we've helped share a good thing. Thank you for being a part of our dream.