Roots, Leaves, Flowers & Me: An Inciting Incident Commemoration
In which a white tea turns silver in my rice bowl as I admire books written by my mates.
Have you ever been properly pantsed by life? Rug pulled? Slammed, full-speed, into what turned out to be a closed sliding glass door?
Or maybe, on a more dire note, can you pinpoint the moment when all that you thought you knew about living shattered? When you realized you had it wrong, all along? Hit a bottom?
Five years ago today, September 20, 2019, I was humming along on my keyboard, writing slow to earn a living in a fast world, when I got a phone call. It was my mother’s landlord. She was calling to tell me my mom was being evicted.
I parked further detail in “Breaking the 4th, Pleading the 5th” my only paid post in the short life of Tea w/ Dweez, but will now add only this: there was a life before that phone call and a life after it. It was, I will claim, the most weighty inciting incidents I’ve experienced in these 38 years.
I didn’t know it then, but this pantsing, shattering, rugging, slamming, wronging, bottoming, inciting would bring me somewhere entirely unexpected. A place with Shinto Omiyamari baptismals at the shrine the first shogun built. Where Rai Tei sea bream marks first-chopstick-wielding Okuizome 100-day celebrations.
Where I bring the boys to their first concert on an ocean view deck in Enoshima with DJ Hashimoto Toru spinning the waviest tunes imaginable before a live set by a group calling themselves (and deserving the name) Calm wraps up with a rendition of Pharaoh Sanders’ “Love Is Everywhere.” Where the photo art of Keiko Sakamoto breathes life into my photo floundering forensics. Where I curb booch cravings by Kyoto Wakocha EM Brew means in Zushi.
Where I regularly can’t tell the difference between dreamland and real life. So jarring and unexpected were the changes to the script that by the time I write to you today I can say honestly that the most loving thing I can continue to do for myself, and the world at large, is to continue to take breaks from story world.
And tea opens the door to the exit. Or is it an entrance?
The best teas take me nowhere. They unfurl me here, now, in the extraordinary suchness of today. These smooth keys. This fractured light. The loosening tensions on the belts of my back muscles. The unscrewing of my jaw sockets. Not sweet, nor bitter, nor sour, nor umami, nor savory. Not even delicious. They drink not like liquid but like wet air. They droop into me and I into them. We attach and mix and stick together. And I’m refastened to the world. Buttoned back up. Glued. Adhesed. Adhered. At eased.
If you gave me the option, I wouldn’t rename Silver Mist. If you lent me a hug to give , I’d offer it to Master Zhang Zhengyi who grows this incredible tea at Lala Mountain in Taiwan, a place I’d never heard of in a decade of drinking teas from the island. It’s a soul tingler. Although the bulk of me has retired from comparing as a rule, the part of me that remains comparative tells me this the best Global Tea Hut tea I’ve ever had by a mile.
I’ve drank it exclusively in the leaves-in-a-bowl style I’ve practiced under the GTH tradition. Although I’m still mugging often, the L.I.B. approach—where I drink out of my daily-use rice bowl—has cracked open new horizons in my tea drinking. I find it less essential to outline the specifics of my doubt about GTH, or really, any of the tea teachers I’ve been privy to study under, other than to say that this phrase applies to me on the extreme end: small doubt, small awakening, mid doubt, mid awakening, big doubt, big awakening.
It's no accident that I every time I’ve sat down to write about the most awe inducing book that’s come into my possession this year, I find myself reaching for this tea. That book is called Roots, Leaves, Flowers: 100 Herbs, Their Properties, & The Teas We Make of Them and it was released earlier this summer by my dear friends at Tea at Shiloh.
Crafted to be an in-the-field herbal companion, this thin, compact volume was beautifully bound & printed in that bracket, not between, but afield from what a traditional art publisher like Taschen produces and what you’d find at a seasoned self-stitched zine stand. Go to your local bookstore and you’ll find a plethora of naturalist literature from tombs to pamphlets. For Los Angeles, the natural history museum’s Wild LA was as trusty a nature guide as I’ve ever wielded and I lugged it to most of the locations recommended therein (including seeing the Sea Turtles in a South Bay river) but for all its merits it had drawbacks that RLF resolves. In addition to its weight in my backpack, it failed to properly hand me the keys to add my own observations. It gave me the fish and told me to go download iNaturalist if I wanted to learn how to fish. Which worked, only to mixed results.
Roots, Leaves & Flowers encourages exploration from the kitchen to the canyon to the cupboard inside our ribcage. Its list of 100 herbs reminds readers of the vast catalog of dance moves between plants and our beings and spirits, while suggesting some places to start swinging your hips. It’s an open hand offering to participate in the ongoing, collaborative movement with the botanical. Drawing on Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurvedic Medicine & Western Herbalism, RLF offers a seasonal map as well as few dozen sample blends to temper or trumpet certain emotions.
I find it no surprise that authorship was shared, as many of the best books are. This one among those who make the DTLA tea house such a special place. Shiloh, Ahdom, Ash Sala, Ellie Benov, & Tanya Matthews and their crew of more than dozen additional recipe and conceptual wizards have offered up more than a book, more than a companion, more, even, than an artifact, but a brick-and-mortar chipped-off-piece of the tea house itself. These outer/inner spacetronauts left ample room on the pages 90-93 for readers to annotate, draw and doodle their way into their own herbal practice. The empty parchment is as soft and inviting to pixel wary eyes as the cushions and pillows that greet you when you drag your tattered, sprawling soul through the teahouse front gate.
This book is itself an inciting incident, though of another kind. It will spark other tea house hatchings to come from these authors and others that frequent the place—tea books, poetry books by those who take to the open mics to read, graphic novels by those who doodled between cups of infusions, albums by musicians who played there and so on—and I’m grateful to have one of the 500 of this first, inciting, edition.
I’ve missed Tea At Shiloh dearly since I moved to Japan. I consider it and the characters who find refuge there, often. A cave of wonders that doubled as a place like home when my own crumbled. A gentle landing on turbulent days. A soft bunker for hard times. I recommend it to LA-bound visitors and Angelenos alike. It became the model for my inner safe space, where the parts that make up my apparently separate self can collide and coalesce and connect.
The tea house inhabitants proved to me you can still be sincere online without being cliché. They gave me hope that I wasn’t alone in the needles I was trying to thread. Now, they’ve showed me how to use those needles to fasten together better ways of being—and publishing.
This book is timeless artifact cared into existence out of the twin teahouse superpowers of hospitality and DIY speculativeverything. In this era of plant medicine pivoting—it’s promise and it’s peril—Roots, Leaves & Flowers is the soft opening many need. It’s what I needed.
Even my cursory reading of the first 30-something entries has offered an alternative to the rigmarole rigidity of my camellia sinensis worship. All those other herbs I so often neglect, I have been reminded again and again here, are worth exploring too. I can’t wait to get started.
But this Silver Mist is still showing some sparkle—and I’ve got a lot of rust still clinging to my soul—so I’ve asked the herbs to wait. They’ve obliged.
Let’s hang onto storylessness for just a little longer, shall we? And may the next inciting incidents go unboxed and left to their own freely enticing devices.
MAY ALL MY FRIENDS WRITE BOOKS What? It’s all there In the title. Prayer & curse, Illness & cure Plea & command. May my beloveds Grip the axe And swing. Where Kakfa pointed. Where Wallace drowned. Where Ozaki drifted. & with all our frozen seas At last raging & placid Imagine the size of pearls We can walk away from.
"Lala Mountain in Taiwan, a place I’d never heard of in a decade of drinking teas from the island."
Probably because it's one of these many, unremarkable smaller mountains that are all over Taiwan (and the PNW), that are not one of the main big ones, seems like around Wulai, where I often used to hike. I've never heard of it either--but I also never bothered to visit Maokong, where tea is also grown, because it's basically just a hilly suburb of Taipei.