Chapter One
READING TEA LEAVES
A Black Kenyan Justice Tea
I stumbled upon Ajiri, a black tea from Kenya, while visiting the Smithsonian African Museum in Washington, DC. Drawn to the elegant artisan boxes depicting scenes made from tiny paper cut-outs, I soon learned that the manufacturer creates employment for the people of western Kenya. All profits are used to educate orphans in the community. We selected to use this award-winning specialty tea in our café for its social justice aftertaste.
To enjoy: Fill a small tea ball halfway with the loose leaves.
Steep this tea, like most black teas, in hot water for 3 minutes.
After steeping, a bit of lemon juice brings out the best flavors.
The tea is even more delicious knowing the goal of the company is to care for the most vulnerable members of the community.
At Thistle Stop Café, we serve Ajiri in to-go boxes as well as offer the loose-leaf tea. In many teahouses, it is unacceptable to give someone a tea bag and a cup of hot water. Tea is served properly in pots with a container for the loose leaves, which is a slower process than offering a hot cup with a tea bag. But it is that that reminds us to slow down and savor each sip.
THE FIRST TIME I looked into the bottom of a teacup to study the leaves, I saw my reflection. My hair was frizzed at the ends and looked like a dried-out halo. A friend and I were finishing up lunch when I noticed loose green tea leaves floating at the bottom of my cup. On a whim, I told him that I could read the leaves.
The conversation had been swirling around tea and the new idea of opening a café as part of Thistle Farms.
“Can you really read tea leaves?” my friend asked. As I looked into the cup and saw my ragged and shadowed halo of hair, I answered, “I guess I can.”
The way of tea teaches us that if we pause and take the time to look closely enough, it is possible that all of us can find ourselves in a good cup of tea. A single leaf of tea is enough to examine the whole universe. Tea offers us contemplation that is so rich and old, if we had eyes to see, time to taste, and a thirst for its truth, we could travel to the ends of the earth and plumb the depths of our hearts. The way of tea can lead us to visit old-growth forests in China, through rituals more than two thousand years old and into a space of meditation where we remember all hearts are made of flesh.
The day I saw my reflection glistening in the golden brew of a teacup, I took it as a sign. By the end of the lunch I knew I wanted to learn everything I could about the way of tea before the café opened. This included developing a palate for tea, learning about the sources of tea, and understanding the issues of justice in the growing and trading of tea, as well as understanding the role tea could play in helping guide our movement of helping women find healing. Soon enough, tea had taken a hold of me, reminded me of my past, and stirred a longing for justice.
My mom was my first guide on the way of tea. She lived by intuition and fortitude. She taught me that when it comes to a spiritual journey, it’s better to lead by the heart and not follow the well-worn path. When we make our own discoveries, there’s an organic element of surprise that signifies the spirit is leading us. It’s a harder path, but it also makes things your own. My mother used to fix tea when I was a child. She worked long, exhausting days running a community center and mothering five kids as a single parent. I remember every evening after the supper dishes were washed; she made a cup of inexpensive Lipton tea. After steeping the tea bag for a few minutes, she wrapped the tea bag’s string around a spoon to squeeze out the richer, blacker droplets. She stored the used tea bag in the spoon beside the sink so she could make a second cup later.
Tea was my mom’s faithful companion throughout her life. Tea carried her through saying good-bye to her husband at the age of thirty-five, through seeing all of her children grow up and out of the house, and through her terminal illness that took her life at the age of sixty-three. Many of my mom’s habits and beliefs have helped form my path. Since she was an avid tea drinker, it only made sense that tea would eventually make its way into the heart of my spiritual journey. When I think of her today, I can still picture her holding the teacup with a thistle pattern from her tea set close to her chest like a prayer.
Tea warmed my mother’s heart, mind, and body, just as it has mine. Like her, I find comfort in hearing the whistle of the kettle in the evening and holding the cup close to my body. Like her, I still wrap the string around the bag and spoon. When I drink my tea and save the tea bag to use again, I can imagine she, too, felt the allure of peace and beauty that drew her in as much as the flavor of the drink.
My mother rarely got to drink loose-leaf tea. Almost all her evenings were spent using tea bags that are filled with “tea dust,” the discarded bits and pieces of tea after producers have collected the loose-leaf tea. What was in the cup was less important than what the tea offered. It offered freedom in time and space to feel comfort and to let her mind wander. Like her, drinking tea gives me freedom to dream beautiful and idealistic thoughts.
Unlike her, I long to have cups of tea filled not with tea bags but with loose leaves swirling as they soak. Loose-leaf tea dances and comes to life in hot water, offering a healing delight to once-plain liquid. We are restored by the tea’s gifts, even after the cup is drained and we are left with limp leaves sitting at the bottom. As I began to pay attention to the art of tea, I loved the idea that perhaps there were signs even at the bottom of an old teacup. It was the leaves that first drew me into learning what tea was willing to teach.
Loose tea drew me in because of its similarities to the living plant and because it holds more of the goodness of the original plant than the tea dust in bags. I hoped staring into the leaves could spell out the next steps of my dream to offer justice to women who have survived trafficking, prostitution, and addiction. A connection existed between the tea and the women I longed to empower, but I wasn’t sure how to find the answer to how they were related. I longed for instant insight into what I needed to do. But perhaps the first step of insight is recognizing how little we know.
Maybe ignorance is a gift. Lack of knowledge at the beginning of a journey can offer us courage to start new ventures. If I’d known how difficult it was going to be to launch Thistle Farms or the café, I may have never taken the first step. If any of the team at Thistle Farms had realized how expensive it would be or how much of our hearts we needed to pour into this dream, we may have just kept talking about tea leaves over lunch. The blissful ignorance of inspiration made me think, “Let’s open a beautiful café with tea and serve a million cups to friends and strangers, and start a new tea revolution to help end trafficking. How hard can it be?”
As a movement, Thistle Farms was growing at an exponential rate and shipping products to more than three hundred stores around the country. If we wanted to continue to grow, we needed to step into our role as a welcoming site for people who wanted to join in the conversation and learn about human trafficking and how they could help be a part of women finding their freedom. The Thistle Stop Café could serve as a hub for people to have conversations, gain sanctuary, and introduce themselves to our community. Trafficking is a direct result of silence and ignorance by communities. It is rooted in the desire to keep the sickness of addiction and child abuse secret. The more light we can shed on the issues and the more we can help educate the population, the safer our whole community will be. The cafe would provide pastors and friends a place to bring folks who were abused and scared to speak their truth. We would offer the business community a place for meetings where women are held in high esteem. We would even begin to hold up the women’s stories as more than survivor stories but ones that ground us all in the truth that love can change the way we treat one another in this world.
In all of our lives, blissful ignorance keeps us dreaming and moving forward. We forget that living a dream is much harder than talking about a dream. When we get ready to climb the mountain, we have no idea the storms we will face on the way. We can’t imagine the sounds at night that will keep us awake with fear. Excitement blinds us to the countless hours of hard work required before inspiration becomes reality. The lack of knowledge at the beginning is a sacred space. If we embrace it, we can learn to thrive in that thick space of time between inspiration and actuality.
This sacred space is where we gain the knowledge we need to go further. It is a hard and rocky ground that calls us into sleepless nights and anxious moments. Sometimes that space is short; other times it can last a lifetime. Usually it is the exact amount of time we need to learn and gain the resources to carry out the venture. The space between now and then is the holy path of hard work. I am used to that space being longer and harder than I imagined, but I still wish for magical insight to come and speed things up.
This space between the dream and actuality is usually more grueling than we plan for at Thistle Farms. Opening up the first residential home within our community took two years. Another two years was required to get our social enterprise off the ground. Six years in, we built our first house from the ground up. The years ticked by in uneven increments. Along the way, wisdom led us to follow more dreams. Looking back, I needed every minute.
The ratio of dream to reality is in direct proportion to sweat equity and time. When my husband of twenty-five years, Grammy-winning songwriter Marcus Hummon, creates a cantata, the melody in his head doesn’t come to fruition right away. First he plays with the idea for hours, modifying and repeating the tune. Then he adds cello and background sounds to truly appreciate the beauty of the initial dream. Working hard on the piece and spending the time charting and recording it hones the original melody, gives time to edit lyrics, and allows the gift of bringing thoughts to life. When a friend of mine who is a landscape architect talks about developing a piece of land, she has to begin with a blank piece of paper and sit on the actual land alone to let it speak to her. That time and space is invaluable to her so that she doesn’t impose herself on the land but lets the land thrive through her work. If she went in knowing what she wanted to design, she would miss the insight the land itself can offer.
The insight we need comes from long contemplation, conversation, and dogged determination. Insight, like a precipice, requires one to climb to the top of a mountain to breathe in the view. We have to endure those long nights and storms to get to the place where the view is even possible. Insight doesn’t come to us just because we wish we had it. We can read a passage of Scripture for years before it comes to life. We can round the same bend in the woods for seasons until one day we finally see the Eden we have been walking through. Just because I wanted to see something beautiful and deep in the bottom of my tea didn’t mean I would.
Insight comes from inspired work in which we learn from both our successes and our failures. Insight doesn’t come from wishing or imagining. If we did have the answers spelled out for us before we began our journey, there would be no reason to take the journey. We’d miss out on the sense of “Eureka” or the lessons we could have learned. Not knowing what lies ahead is no reason not to start walking. When we find ourselves afraid of failure or worrying about success, the best thing to do is just keep our heads down and take another step forward. If we just stay where we are, we will never get anywhere. I had no clue what I was looking for staring into the cup, but it was enough just to be looking. Insights are gained by hard lessons that unfold during journeys of new understanding and ventures like tea and justice. It seems crazy sometimes to think that any of us can try to change the world by our small inspirations of justice, but it is crazier to think that the world will change if we never try.
The art of reading tea leaves is known as tasseography, a kind of fortune-telling that interprets patterns. The practice is rooted in a desire to understand ourselves and make sense of the world. Tasseography was popularized as a kind of parlor game and is seen as a tool for tapping into the subconscious by applying insight and meaning to pattern recognition. But like any kind of mystical endeavor, reading tea leaves loses something in translation when we read the instruction guide.
A great description of reading leaves can be found in the book Taking Tea.2 The authors claim some of the first tea readers were the Scottish, who could read the leaves “like a gypsy.” These readers would get up early in the morning because reading the breakfast tea leaves determined the mood of the day. If it was going to be unlucky, the person should just get back in bed.
Reading tea requires loose tea poured unstrained into cups. After everyone finishes their tea, they offer silent wishes like the thoughts before you blow out birthday candles or throw a coin into a fountain. The reader of the leaves takes the cup and swirls it three times clockwise. Then the reader inverts the cup on the saucer until the last drip of tea runs off. At that moment, the reader turns the cup upright again; the leaves stick to the bottom. The tea reader then searches for shapes in the leaves, such as birds, animals, numbers, or outlines of maps that might allude to the future of the drinker.
I stared at the bottom of my favorite mug searching for these magical, elusive images. I even tried blurring my eyes to see the leaves as I did for those magic three-dimensional images that became popular in the 1990s. The trick was to stare deep enough into the artwork until the blurry dots revealed the hidden three-dimensional image. Staring into the bottom of my favorite white mug, I allowed my eyes to blur and refocus, waiting patiently for everything to become clear. At first, I thought I might be looking at Chinese characters, but since I cannot read Chinese, I figured I was probably still staring into a pile of wilted leaves. Then I shifted my focus to the negative space to see if the lighter areas had something to reveal.
The leaves are not full of insight and truth just because I want them to be. Though I long for vision to be presented like a floral bouquet, beautiful and neat, it rarely appears as easily or readily. In my own life, insights come quickly only in rare moments such as a low-flying hawk casting a shadow over a wild thistle nearby. In those beautiful times insight rises like a new thought out of a morning mist. But far and away I mostly gain insight from rearview mirrors that reflect the gift of making my way by hard work and the discernment of sweat and tears.
In the ensuing weeks, what struck me was how I continued to picture tea leaves in my mind’s eye. I could see tea leaves in a bundle of owl feathers I spotted on a forest path. Tea leaves emerged in late-afternoon storm clouds. Tea-leaf shapes appeared in melting ice cubes in my glass. Finally it dawned on me that I needed actually to see the leaves themselves and quit trying to imagine something else. I needed to see what was before me. Often, when we step into something new, we don’t recognize that what we need next is right before us.
The insight that I needed literally came from reading the story of actual tea leaves. Leaves strewn on a saucer come from somewhere and were picked by someone. They have earned the honor of being the oldest cultivated plant on record. These leaves of wisdom are rooted back before time was recorded, set firmly in creation. It is not enough to dump them onto a saucer and see if they fall in a way that spells out something magical. Instead, these leaves are a launching pad for a spiritual path. Staring at the leaves when I began dreaming of a café, I got the message that it was time to dive into this cup, study the books, and learn how to read all that the leaves had to teach.
The story that the tea leaves tell has filled books that trace the entire history of civilization and cover the spectrum of humanity including revolution, oppression, ritual, and culture. The story of tea is one of romance, renewal, and reflection. The lessons of tea unfold not just in a huge complicated historical story but also in sweet personal memories that live in our hearts. We should approach tea with great reverence for the million lessons it can teach us along the way. In the small rituals of wrapping tea bag strings around a spoon or staring into the bottom of a cup, the story of tea comes alive.
I drink tea as I write this manuscript. I drink it while I research, interview people, and pray. I am not even sure where it is leading. I don’t know yet if the café will stay a dream or open. I wait and watch to see who will share their cup with the community of Thistle Farms. When you drink enough tea, you can start to feel it take root and change your composition. You lose your taste for coffee, and you long to hold the warmth of the teacup in your hands. Tea will lure you like a young lover, calling you with the oldest siren song to come and drink from this cup that offers insight and new life. I want to drink more and get to the root of where it comes from and see where it leads. I want to find out how justice tastes on the backs of the oldest leaves that, like the women of Thistle Farms, have survived so much injustice. But I want us all to drink tea with our eyes wide open, not lured by fancy packaging that blindsides us and begs us to judge the book by the cover. The same humble tea can be dressed up like it’s going to afternoon tea at Buckingham Palace or preparing for meditation in a Tibetan monastery. Tea can be Zen, or organic, or girly, or colonial. It can be as tempting as an apple in a wild garden—that is part of its romance. My hope is to get through the packaging and find how justice can be pursued in the buying and selling of tea and how all of us can share a cup and celebrate freedom.
Even after reading countless books and studying the ancient practices, I still can’t read leaves except to recognize that they call me to pay attention. Instead, what I’ve learned by searching for hidden patterns in wet tea leaves is that opportunities are ever before us. When we keep our eyes open, there’s no telling what image may emerge. As we begin to move forward to lay hold of those visions and dreams, we will encounter setbacks, detours, disappointments, and fears. But if we push forward in reverence and humility, we may uncover a future better than we ever could have imagined. Tea can help us get there. It allows us to see something holy and romantic in simply pouring a cup of hot water over a bag and sipping in the gifts of creation. Through a cup of tea, the whole world can open up.