With a few simple changes in habit, adding a heaping spoonful of quiet attention, the act of taking tea may be transformed from ”drink" to “oasis”. Perhaps in the end, it is a medium for mindfulness, simple, profound… where repeated action with awareness is infused with ritual, is elevated by stages above the mundane.

Carefully choose ingredients

Attention to the tea you use is attention to your being. This plant was cultivated for medicinal and other uses before the first written reference, in the third century AD; there are many cultivars and nuances of flavor, character, and levels of caffeine. Your choice of leaf affects your experience in the moment and the continuation of your day.

What is the conversation between the them, in the silence at the center of things? They would speak it if they found it; they would find it if they did not look for it:

— The world is moving inside of me.

— I see the world moving inside of you.

— I am becoming a new, multiple me. The heart is growing toward every horizon. When I stretch toward one, I am pulled by the others. I am fuller than I have ever been. You cannot see all of me.

The mind is like the body in that it settles over time: these joints, my joints, supple yet some of their spring is past; I dare say the arc of my body has moved beyond its height; and I find my thoughts these days are as informed by a personal history as they are by the all-possible present, gravity being the agent of change.

These thoughts. They are gently urged to earth, so that what was once a bright green fancied flight flutters down to a slightly darker summer tone, or to September’s dust, not somber yet but… sobering. I knew (when first I stood) that gravity pulled on my frame, but hadn’t yet understood how the gravity of time, experienced and therefore set in the stone of my bones, made New in my eyes less likely, almost an act of will: I refuse to allow the prevalent physical violence of Brazil to invade the relative peace of Barcelona, and I resist – to the best of my abilities – the psychological violence of the United States, as it places the beautiful circle of my family and friends under siege.

The “In Box” always occupied a particular flat area of my desk, a particular field of view just in front of my mouse, where I could (and would) clearly see it fill and the mound of papers build, day after day.

Sort-of to-dos – those important enough to stay in my awareness, but not quite important enough to handle immediately – would land on the top of the pile, be buried by the next falling document, and never leave. This became my Pile of Disappointment, and I did eventually empty it, once a month or so; but in that month, oh what an emotional toll it took. It’s little lash reached out to lick my hand several times a day.

It is beautiful to acquire skill – through meditation, through prayer or patience – to simply live with emptiness when it arrives. To inhabit your wisdom like a good father or a good mother, not become fragile and frantic like the little boy whose mother has left the room, like the little girl who doesn’t yet know her mother will return, a moment later, with a smile and something sweet, with her warm arms security, with nourishment.

Every meal weaves Miracle; water, sun and soil are its threads.

Though my knife could end a creature’s life to continue mine, I have chosen a gentler line.

The heart on its hinge swings in the wind; bangs open, bangs closed, welcomes you in.

I eat with silence as though silence were my kin.

Together, or alone, a meal weaves Miracle; water, sun and soil the moment’s thread.

Panch Ratan “Five Jewels” Dal A home-made dal is food for a king, or queen (and you are worthy of the crown)

The inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent liked the number forty. There are a couple of dozen references to 40, measuring days or years, in those ancient teaching scripts and histories that we’ve collected into the Judeo-Christian Bible. Forty days of rain, forty years in the wilderness, forty days on the mountain; forty years old, forty sons, forty cubits, forty baths, forty days’ fast.

Other than the numeric connotation (and the fact that everything is related to everything else), there was nothing biblical about the “Alpha” trial period for my standing desk. There was a flash of insight in the form of a worrisome news article, and a half-hour’s work shifting my office from the window that overlooked the garden and the apple tree at its center; the rest was riding out the alpha wave, waiting for a sign that would tell me to: a) land my standing desk in a more permanent place, b) take it apart plank by plank, or c) keep on waiting.

Physically, I feel good getting up to work in the morning. I think it’s because I don’t get up just to sit down again. My body feels energized most of the morning, mind alert, and my frame moves around while I type up the morning’s correspondence. Two weeks in, I remain happy with the switch to a standing desk, and am considering when to build my “Beta” version, levitating my old sitting desk one-half-person into the air on a hand-designed scaffold.

There is a certain volume of accumulated human knowledge — a kind of Encyclopaedia of Safety — that is based on the trial-and-error successes of generations. One entry in that tome might be as quaint as “don’t shit in your bed” (Any argument…?) Our Australian friends have several: “Don’t introduce species into an ecology with no known predators.” (oops), or “Don’t irrigate your desert with a limited aquifer.” (oops)

There are others:

Except in my imagination, I don’t pretend to understand the permanent blackness of those who have lost their sight. Even less, those who were born without that faculty, and so have no access to even the memory of color: to sense red, they must feel red on their skin, the subtle variation in frequency from one hue to the next.

In the landscape of the never-sighted, I imagine certain words lose their texture, deprived as they are of connotation. When I say “red”, I see flowers; I see blood; I smell the perfume of a rose, or feel my pulse quicken with desire, or deflate in despair; I see a red balloon, recall a single frame from a French film; I smell the stink of post-War fear, I hear the ruffle of Chinese banners over some Premier’s visit to Harvard Square; I see her body where it blushes with life, and from that color, her scent.