Building a room, speedily

As I mentioned in my last post, there has been very little Tea in my life since the local Urasenke chapter closed in August. There will be new classes soon through an administratively separate organization known as the Tankokai.

Last Sunday, the Tankokai held a refresher course for those who have been without Tea for these many months and who fear they have forgotten everything they know.

Not fifteen minutes ago, this room had nothing but chairs in it.

There are currently no available tea rooms in the DC area, but the Tankokai has a tea room that fits, piled high, in the back of an SUV. We had a room rented at the McLean Community Center, and at the appointed time this tea-room-in-an-SUV drove up to the entrance. The six students and two teachers rapidly brought everything, tatami by tatami and utensil by utensil, into the room.

And then, BOOM! Instant tea room.

I think the thing that impressed me the most was the sunken hearth of the ro season, which was only sunken a few inches but managed to pull off the recessed look despite sticking up out of the ground.

The horizontal black line near the bottom of the image is in fact an invisible wall. There is an invisible door at the spot where the black line ends on the left.

I performed the first Tea of the day, and was greatly relieved to find that I had not forgotten as much as I had expected. Everything felt quite natural and ordinary within this instant room, except for the act of sitting on the floor and making the three motions necessary to first open and then close a rice paper door. (As you can see, the door was invisible.) This felt especially odd when the teacher corrected me for holding the door from too high a position.

I'm looking forward to the new Tea school opening later this spring. Until then, I should try making do with my own partially imaginary rooms.

Seasonality and Music

Last fall, the Washington DC branch of the Urasenke school closed its doors. This spring, likely in March, a new complex of classrooms will open up downtown, in a Metro-accessible location. There is a lot of good to this change, some bittersweet, and the inconvenience of a solid half-year without tea classes.


Happily, tomorrow I will be in a tea class for the first time since early August. It will be a refresher course on the most basic tea preparation. As part of my preparation, I pulled out my books last night to research seasonal names for February.


Tea is deeply attuned to the seasons in an oddly stylized way. Last year on a very cold April day, I used a seasonal word that seemed to fit the weather perfectly. I was told that the word was inappropriate, since it was a word for February or March. The seasonal conceit of Tea looks forward, toward what is coming.


Looking for seasonal words, I decided that February might be the most ascetically appropriate month for Tea. There is a poem appropriate to this time of year that is basically Tea, crystallized and frozen:


To those who lust after only cherry blossoms, I want to point out the mountain hamlet spring grasses breaking through the snow. -Ietaka*


I spent the early evening reading about February and contemplating the rich tapestry of seasonality, where an icy wind can bring about a parting of snow, which implies that spring will come eventually, but which also tells us that it is February, that there will be a fire in the hearth. There will be specific bowls and certain sweets to keep the guests warm but to remind them that trees will be budding soon.


After a while, I exchanged the Tea books for prayer books so that my husband and I could greet the Sabbath. When we reached L'cha Dodi, a mystical celebration of the coming of Shabbat, S--- chose a tune normally associated with a bedtime song about four angels. It's a very common thing in Judaism to use the tune for one song/prayer when singing another. In this case, whether or not S--- meant it, I saw a connection between the mystical Jerusalem-of-the-mind Shabbat and the angels that visit the house at the beginning of the meal. 


It's good to live in a world of implications and deeper meanings, where an insight into one part of a tradition will open up another part, drawing new meaning along with perspective. It's also good to sing, and it's good to keep an eye on nature.




*Translation from Chado: The Way of Tea, A Japanese Tea Master's Almanac, by Sasaki Sanmi.