Thunder in the Lake

We are dashing against each other like boats:

Our eyes are darkened though we are in clear water.

O you who have gone to sleep in the body’s boat,

You’ve seen the water,

But look at the Water of the water

The water has a Water that is driving it;

The spirit has a Spirit that is calling it.

  — Melvana Jalaluddin Rumi. Mathnawi III.

Far away from shore, out of sight of land, the only sound is the lapping of the waves. A solid bulkhead of churning clouds blur the line between slate lake and grey sky. The waters flow and so do the clouds. A daytime gloom persists, with no sun and no sign of direction but for the rhythm of the waves and the swelling of the cloud forms. Here you are amid this strange, starless universe, in the middle of the lake. Suddenly, a surge of foam bubbles up from below. You feel the propulsion of water being displaced, though it's unclear by what.No sooner have you got your bearing that a darkening silhouette races from the depths and a line of jagged teeth with a furrowed brow breaches the waves in an instant, bursting into the air with a crack of thunder, a fine mist of spray sloughing off its scales, shedding a vapor trail as it winds and soars towards the sky, releasing a powerful, water-trembling peal--it is a creature so terrible and so beautiful it takes your breath away: a bluish-green sheen of its half-scaled, half-feathered body this being winds its way into the clouds like it's lifted by divine wind. No sooner do you see it then it disappears into a stormhead, inspiring concordant streaks of lightning in it wake. A thousand little ripples dot the surface of the rolling waves, as rain falls from the heavens.

 

Sheltered in place during the earliest days of the lockdowns of 2020, I began reading every book I could on tea. I'm not really sure why. Sensible advice says I should have been reading about multi-channel strategy, e-commerce optimization and diversifying our product mix so that we somehow survive the onslaught and imminent collapse of our business. Anyways, one of these books was by an author named Frank Hadley Murphy, and came recommended from other tea people, called (interestingly enough) The Spirit of Tea. I enjoyed the book as it was quite different from a historical non-fiction; a How-To or Fundamentals of Tea; and it wasn't entirely in the realm of the esoteric or spiritual either, rather it straddled these worlds. I read a passage in the book, which reads as follows: "Of all the hexagrams of the I Ching the one I return to again and again is hexagram #17 or Sui, or following where the image reads "Thunder in the middle of the lake." The lower trigram is Chen which means ‘arousing thunder' and the upper trigram is Tui ‘the joyous lake.' This is the hexagram that best captures the essence of tea. Tea represents the rousing, mobilizing force of thunder resting within the gentle and joyous waters of the lake."

 

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive when we started 

And know the place for the first time.

—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets.

 

I read that passage and sat with it for a while. Then I did what all sensible readers and researchers do: took a picture of it with my phone and forgot about it for five years. Then I moved on with my life. It wasn't until, given the course of events this year, I was moved to look back in.

 

Hexagram #17 captures tea's seemingly paradoxical duality: calming and stimulating; the joy and peace of the lake stirred by the astonishing inspiration and rousing thunder in our hearts. Take only one and you have an incomplete picture. It is a cup that calls to us, tilts our head up out of the fast, navel gazing banality of our everyday existence into something greater. With tea, we remove distractions and other justifications. I said it more simply on our hastily written tenth birthday announcement "We believe in tea--but it's bigger than tea."

 

The title of the hexagram, Sui, means "Following" but not in the sense that we usually use the word (i.e. "following" others). The hexagram celebrates the joy, power, and providence of leading not with orders and tyranny, but by positive example, which makes others want to follow you. "You should seek first to help others without extracting gratitude, and to steward without exercising authority." Sui means proceeding. Following the call of the path only you hear. In essence, it connotes true leadership, a surrender to vision, insight, creation and change. Tyrants terrorize from their own insecurity and desire for power, and they all face the same fate. I sometimes think we have achieved far more by drawing imitations and emulators of our vision and mission, than we have by what we've personally undertaken or instructed ourselves.

 

"It's just really light..." Ten years ago, the hardest part of persuading a new public to try our tea was that it wasn't enough. The flavors were too light, the caffeine too slight, it didn't stand up to milk, and given these things it cost way too much. Even if a client understood the heritage, craft, and consideration behind each of these teas' production (and even if they plied their trade in a similar producer/terroir-driven industry) some part of the equation didn't add up. This was a different time--and the teas that pervaded our market at the time were largely flavored with oils, which gave them an inflated sense of "natural" sweetness. Everyone wanted something from tea: it just usually wasn't tea.

Calvin Chen, whose father's production, the 2006 Wuyi Cultivar graces this release, is a great example of following. The elder (and late) Mr. Chen knew twenty years ago that the market would not continue to favor Mingjian, Taiwan roasted tea. Already, a huge shift toward flowery, green high mountain oolong had begun drawing business away from the family. He might have planted his feet and said "someone will always want this!" (certainly Japanese matcha makers were vindicated a mere millennium after its introduction) but instead, he went to the mainland and sourced exemplar and heritage cultivars, transplanting them and changing them through touch: recontextualizing and reimagining the possibilities of these beloved styles with what Mingjian, and his family knew best: expressive, layered roasting. Coupled with 19 years of age, the tea is a dynamic wonder that should be tasted beside its fresh version.

 

And just as the Chens looked across the Strait for new (old) ideas for the moment--we fostered a similar dialogue through our Taiwan - Yunnan Collaboration. Two of the makers we revere most are Mr. Luo in Fengqing, Yunnan (Sunstone) and Mr. Luo (Exuding Jade #22) in Shanlinxi, Taiwan. Despite completely different climates, varietals, and market realities, we observed a kindred spark in the pair, who certainly hadn't met one another, but share similar fastidious-minded production philosophies. The idea began as a long shot (we even got caught up on the surname coincidence) but at the end of the day we sponsored the travel and commissioned the lots in advance. Some, like Fragrant Consort Black, use Taiwanese stock, while others like the Yunnan Golden Bud, meld beautiful Yunnan Dianhong old tree stock with care in plucking, and the latter Luo's expertise in processing and Zhou Shui "walking water."

 

Consider:

whether you’re a human being, an insect, a microbe, or a stone, this verse is true.
 All that you touch

You change.

 All that you Change

Changes you.

  — Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

 

Every choice you make--even the seemingly superficial (like what you wore today) speaks to your values. Everything you touch you change. Launching a tea compendium is no different. If you're this deep, still reading this meandering essay on the blog of a seasonal tea company you are probably someone like us, who values slowness--that attunes to the slower and greater rhythm of the seasons. We undertake our mission with staid attention and patience as you have to be aware of how you are changing the producer's work. These are imprints. But so too have we been imprinted upon.

 

To move with and attune to these times is not easy. We live in hypernormalized, febrile times. No horror seemingly registers before we bear the next one and the next. There seems a point in my and most of my friend's lives where some deep part of us starts screaming for air. It usually happens at our jobs. Regardless of the not insubstantial turmoil most of us weather in our internal lives, we each face a deluge of terror, idiocy, injustice and cruelty from the external. And at several points in our lifetime, it reaches a point as if to say "Why are we doing this?" "Why am I at work in the middle of a global pandemic?" "Why do we pretend like none of this is happening?" One feels extremely under the yoke of powers that we submit to without thinking or giving pause. Things are happening to us. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. This is not what a human being was meant to spend their life doing. We are asleep in the boat, and the boat rolls on glittering and profound water.

 

I often return to the lake, our lake, to surrender to "its gentle and joyous waters." Riding bikes, arriving under big skies, smelling of sweat and sunscreen to take a plunge off the concrete revetments or to go out on certain nights with a friend, a bottle, and a messob to sit out a while and get lost. I don't think there are many Chicagoans who haven't come to sit in the sweep of its awesome power, its awesome peace. There are times on certain summer nights, when little bands of revelers dot the limestone steps; their shouts drowned out by the sound of the waves and the wind, a scattering of stars above. If you are lost, feeling alone, possessed of those all-too-rare meandering days whereby you crawl, chance by chance, off the grid; or heartbroken; or in love; it is a good thing to sit by the lake.

 

Tui, the upper trigram of #17, the "joyous lake" offers a lesson about dropping your preconceived notions. It's a reminder not to impose your own idea on something before you've experienced it. Joy depends on this: live life on its own terms. "Following" means being there, eager in the unfurling moment. "If you hold your hand closed, nothing good can come of it. The open hand is blessed, for it gives abundance, even as it receives."

 

䷐

The upper three lines of the above hexagram are the upper "trigram" and the bottom three lines are the lower.

 

In the first year of Spirit Tea, with no orders to pack and no ravenous public knocking down our door demanding farmer direct tea, Jordan and I would often sit in his tiny studio apartment, each across its most precious piece of decor, a basalt stone tea tray, sipping steep after steep, pondering out loud what we could do differently; what form the business might eventually congeal into. With no case studies, no exemplars, and certainly no proof of our own concept, we were continually making it up. When you aren't playing by "rules" or classical business advice--it's constantly tempting to want to cash in and take the easier way (health blends, big box grocery stores, flavored blends) but for whatever reason (least of all our own success) we stayed true to the original impulse: tea for tea's sake.

 

The trigram Tui was beloved by Carl Jung who saw its depths as evocative of the subconscious mind--a vessel of what is hidden, unspoken, or only partially formed. You go to the "gladdening" lake when difficult decisions loom, or when you reach a diverging path in life. The surface appears peaceful but conceals powerful motion: dreams, memories, and suppressed longings. It works literally for tea as "the vessel." Sudden thunder animates our subconscious lake with a shock--a stream of boiling water awakening the leaves--stirring movement from within: creative ideas and emotional impulses arise from thunder: the ego yielding to the subconscious.

 

Another way of thinking about Tui is that our truer, deeper desires lie below the surface--and it sometimes takes rousing thunder to bubble them up. As Jung says, "What you resist will not only persist, but grow." The concept of the "shadow self." The lake's surface is calm but it conceals a submerged reality: authentic and sometimes difficult emotional truths. A vessel that holds the unconscious. Thunder breaking through is the unconscious breaking through our carefully constructed "persona." By this reading "following" means listening to the strings of the subconscious, accepting the shadow without rejecting it. Following what is right within often comes with the knowledge that you do not see that truth reflected without. You must honor what you know to be true.

 

According to USCB Science Line, lightning strikes water because "a ‘channel' of ionized air will form that acts just like a skinny wire between the clouds and the water. The charge will flow through the channel from the water up to the clouds forming a lightning bolt. This flow of charge is electrical current." The laws of physics tell us nature abhors a vacuum and matter can neither be created nor destroyed. The Yijing says, "things cannot exhaust themselves."

 

Lightning is violent and illuminating. It's five times hotter than the surface of the sun and shines with the equivalent brightness of 100 million light bulbs. It can be terrifying, but we can receive its terror as a kind of sudden, jolting truth. We must serve as a channel, a conductive rod, for it to strike. It is famously unpredictable and apparently never strikes twice. Being shaken from our sleep happens in the most unsuspecting moment. Shock; stir; arousal; inspiration--like lightning--jolt us out of what we thought was our life.

 

The lower trigram in #17, Chen, means arousing thunder. In Ten Wings, the Confucian guide to the Yijing, it says, "Chen is the dragon. It brings movement. In the spring, thunder awakens all beneath the heavens." In Chinese tradition, dragons reside in bodies of water. They are also associated with storms and protection. One of the tea's in this release, the Dragonwell, famously hearkens to the legend of one such benevolent, storm-bringing giant. Stricken by drought, villagers near Xihu ("the West Lake") in Hangzhou prayed at a well, believed to be inhabited by a benevolent dragon spirit. Moved by their sincerity, the dragon emerged and brought much-needed rain, saving the crops and bringing prosperity to the region. In gratitude, the villagers named the well "Dragonwell" (龙井, Longjing). Over time, the tea grown near this well came to bear the same name.

 

In some ways, Spirit has changed very little since we began: we did not abandon the core essence of transparent-to-source, producer driven, uncommon teas that are proof of the place, talent and tradition that they stem from. Because we could not move for the market, the market kindly moved for us. For the most part, I think that the sincerity, curiosity, and warmth Jordan and I felt huddled around that stone tea tray is how I see our team show up each day. Yet, in many important ways we have had to adapt and flow. Some realities have shifted: our customer demographics; global geopolitics; the steady worsening of climate change; expanding our product mix; matcha going from an auxiliary offering to beleaguered top seller; more than I care to mention. The lesson of a decade is that these things are not your enemy. When you honor your internal convictions you find that the road isn't trying to fight you--you need not resist change, only to accept and proceed.

 

Following teaches us the paradox of true leadership: it is not about exerting will, but embodying what is timely, righteous, and true--even and especially when it is not good business, snappy marketing, or convenient. As we round the corner on this summer, we are guided by the way we are following. All things proceed. We yield to the flow. This is the first day of the next ten years, and I remember it well. About thirteen years ago, a good friend of mine and I sat in the blue-gold light of a rooftop of an old high rise that looked out high above the glassy, shimmering surface of the lake. We drank tea, meditated, and in turn read verses of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Two years later that friend and I started a small tea business. Like a child, true joy is experienced by being open to the world. Make your heart like a lake. Give to receive joy. We are asleep in the body. To paraphrase John Donne, no man sleeps from the prison to the gallows, so why do we all sleep from the womb to the grave? We are never thoroughly awake. Thunder is proof that it is an astonishment to be alive and it behooves you to be astonished.