Chapter Three
DRINKING TEA IN COMMUNITY
Milk Thistle Recipe
Milk thistle, a plant belonging to the same family as daisies, is native to the Mediterranean regions and grows in Europe, North America, South America, and Australia. Milk thistle has been used for thousands of years in Europe to restore and detoxify the liver. After trauma, it settles the body to a needed balance. The seeds contain the antioxidant silymarin, which has health benefits. Thistle tea improves digestion and strengthens the immune system. The thistles are a symbol of hope for us at Thistle Farms and keep us on solid ground, ground that once felt cracked and parched. All parts of the milk thistle plant have been eaten as food, and its seeds have been used for a drink similar to coffee.
Milk thistle tea blends are available at gourmet and specialty stores, but a less expensive, healthier, and tastier option is to create your own. Combine 2 tablespoons milk thistle seeds with 2 tablespoons cardamom pod seeds and 2 tablespoons dandelion root. (All ingredients can be purchased online.) Smash this mixture with a back of a spoon or pestle. Avoid grinding it into dust. Add this blend to 3 tablespoons of your favorite basic loose-leaf China green tea. Steep 1 tablespoon per cup for 5 minutes. Enjoy.
Herbal teas are not teas in the strictest sense of the word but simply tisanes. They are hot beverages made from herbs, leaves, and roots of plants, but they do not contain the actual tea plant. They can have wonderful tea qualities to them—of offering a rich, hot flavor—and your senses react to herbal tinctures much the same as to tea. There are chamomile, thistle, lavender, and countless other herbal teas to choose from. They are organic and reek of the earth. They steep in humility like all wild medicines and are good for our minds, bodies, and souls. Growing and serving herbal teas are essential to what the café stands for. They offer healing from the earth and make us aware of how the way we eat helps us move toward wholeness.
GROWING THISTLE FARMS, INCLUDING the new café venture, has long required me to be on the road telling our story and securing funding, but as I checked into a small-town hotel in the Shenandoah Valley of West Virginia, an old and all-too-familiar fear rushed through me. It is a fear that I have kept close as I have grown organizations and churches. There are times when things are so lean that you can feel the skin of your teeth. Over the years I have heard all the things that fear was whispering into my head that day: What if this new group of strangers don’t have the slightest interest in helping? What if Thistle Farms loses money and we have to lay off employees who feel the security of a paycheck for the first time in their lives?
I looked past the check-in clerk and into the reflection of fear I saw in the huge mirror behind his head, thanked him for the room keys, and left, determined to quiet my anxiety before speaking. Over the years I’ve discovered that whenever those negative thoughts swirl inside my head, I need to start walking. Something about walking moves a heart away from fear and toward freedom. Walking through town, I discovered a coffee and tea shop that greeted visitors with a sign that said, “You’re welcome here!” Those three words were like a blanket of comfort to a wandering pilgrim in search of community. They also reminded me that sometimes we imagine that our visions are new insights, when we are merely stepping into old truths that are just new to us. I ordered a berry herbal tea blend and held the mug against my chest, feeling its warmth pour into my soul. The hot herbal drink quenched my thirst even though it was muggy outside. Though it might seem counterintuitive to drink a hot beverage on such a day, the truth is that while tea warms you in winter, it also cools you on warmer days. Sipping herbal tea can give you a cooling peace even on lonely and anxiety-laden afternoons. Tea can quiet voices of worry and fear long enough for a more rational frame of mind to take hold.
A volunteer at Thistle Farms recently shared how a community helped her quiet her fears and heal:
I walked a path of solitude, abandonment, and sexual abuse from toddlerhood to early adulthood. Along the frightful darkness of my unchosen path came moments of hope, faith, and love. These splashes of “rays” provided the foundation of resilience and courage necessary to survive each day. Though the path I walk today is full of happiness and sunshine, the journey of healing is an ongoing reality that demands my honesty, fearlessness, and compassion.
The continued love and support of my beautiful daughters, loving husband, family, and friends humbles me each and every day. Upon receiving a Thistle Farms gift from my oldest daughter several years back, my passionate desire to become a Thistle Farmer has graciously become a reality. What a serendipitous moment to walk through Thistle Farms’ doors after retiring from thirty-six years in the food industry, just in time to share my experience and be a part of opening the Thistle Stop Cafe.
—Kathy Nelson
Tea was my companion on that muggy afternoon alone in the hills of West Virginia. It dawned on me as I drained the last bit of berry herbs that Thistle Farms was becoming a whole village. Like tea, people are a blend of complexity and simplicity. Alone, sometimes we are left with our own anxiety, and sometimes in that space our dreams can’t be sustained. But gathered together as a community, people have immeasurable power and potential for doing good. Many of the volunteers share the same longing for community where their own private fears can be quieted and where they can be nurtured by others who welcome them into a circle of hope.
We need to be able to serve tea and say “welcome” as a whole community. Thistle Farms is already sewing, making paper, and making bath and body care products. It is now time to welcome strangers every week into our midst with a beautiful cup of tea as each wanders in from the internal and external hithers and yons of this world. We touch a global community whenever we touch or serve tea. We are touching the sweat and work of pickers and cultivators and shippers and retailers from places we have never seen. In the café we drink from a cup offered as treasure from a fellow pilgrim we’ve never met. This practice of drinking tea connects us around the world and back to our hearts as we make our way into the new space. Serving tea will be a way for us to help individuals birth new communities of hope around the world.
While our deepest fears cannot be extinguished just by the gift of community, it is the daily medicine that helps us walk through the fears we have to face alone. Julian of Norwich summed up the nature of that path beautifully seven hundred years ago when she wrote in Revelations of Divine Love: “If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”9 Love, found in the gift of a community, will be with us after we succeed or if we fail, but we are not guaranteed a carefree and safe path just because we love. This way of tea is grounded in love, but it is not without cost.
When I returned from the beautiful valley where hills roll and strangers offered encouragement and financial help to start this new venture, I began to pour more and more tea. By mid-March we knew we needed a quarter of a million dollars to see a café come to life. My hope had been to raise a hundred thousand dollars. As projects find communities and communities have ideas, things get more complicated. We had doubled the size and scope of the project so that the café could meet the size of the need. It was a lot to take in, because I knew it meant we had to do all the demolishing, floor laying, deck building, and painting ourselves to keep construction costs down so we would have enough in our coffers to open with equipment and inventory.
I have learned much from years of working with committees and teams of people who feel strongly about things and don’t shy away from expressing their convictions. Individual expression is a good thing as a sign of communal buy-in to the vision. When I first launched the Magdalene community, I struggled at night to figure out how we could ever move forward without hurting someone’s feelings. It’s a tricky road because there’s nothing worse than design by committee. I have sat through committee meetings that feel as crazy as loose tea in a pot of hot water when it floats in wild, uneven patterns. But I also believe in the inspired nature of community. Community is a gift in which the sum is greater than its parts. The entity of community is what keeps us accountable and holds us up when we need support. Groups of people force us to think bigger and come to a new place of understanding.
Committees or teams can become a hindrance when you have to wait for everyone to agree on things like logos, menu selection, and colors. A team where everyone has to agree on every last detail can kill the life of a muse and weaken the most fervent of leaders. There have been times when we have waited for weeks for people to agree on colors for candles or scents for oils in our manufacturing facility. The best way we’ve found to work together is to allow everyone to express their opinion, including the person with actual design and architectural work experience. After all the ideas are offered, the one person designated as the designer is allowed to move forward.
Tea has been through the journey of individual inspiration and community decision making a million times. It has been blended, cured, baked, bricked, and dried, just to suit the particular fancy of the owner. Tea has been watered down, broken, and smuggled by groups that used it for its own purposes. How tea has come to be what it is has been due in some ways to the particular preference or vision of the person manipulating the leaves and/or the company refining them to withstand disease, weather conditions, and pestilence. If the goal of our café is to serve justice and freedom with tea, I am happy to surrender my personal opinion on design so we can walk peaceably to higher ground. We will each have areas we excel in and areas in which we may have a personal opinion that is just that—a personal opinion.
The end result of communities working on growing, producing, and trading tea for more than three thousand years is that tea takes on countless different personalities, depending on the personality of the person in charge. Each tea made in a certain region at a certain period by a certain cultivator becomes unique and carries a signature. Like a fine wine, it is formed by terroir, a region’s soil and climate. When you sip a cup of tea, it might have been grown in India, China, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Ecuador, Japan, China, or any of the other twenty countries now producing tea. It could have traveled a greater part of the 25,000 miles in less than twenty-four hours on the modern tea routes that link the whole world. Each tea tastes and smells unique, and each has been handled by hundreds of individuals in a chain of markets to bring you a tea by a larger committee.
That is how I hope it will be with the café. Though connected in some ways to every other cafe, it will look and feel different. The store will have its own terroir because of the community who created it and the community who frequents it. In some ways, that terroir lies at the core of all successful social endeavors. They’re connected to the universal, are steeped in local ground, and uphold our ideals of justice.
It seems like a dream that a simple, earthy, and welcoming community could help women who have almost always felt the scales of justice tip away from them. The communities that most of the women of Magdalene grew up in worked against them. For hundreds of years, the vast majority of tea that has been consumed in this world reeked of injustice because of the way it was grown, picked, processed, and traded. Two examples of how tea was linked to human trafficking include the treatment of Tamals in Ceylon in the late nineteenth century, and the forced labor of people in India after the East India Company ceased the slave trade.10 Stories such as these make tea a hard drink to swallow sometimes. These two examples of injustice have been going on for centuries.11 While people were sipping tea in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, slave labor and drug trafficking were helping manufacture and transport this civilized drink.12 In the 1840s, Britain started the Opium Wars, and after a victory over China, new ports opened that allowed the smuggling of tea seeds and manufacturing processes to England. In order for England to grow tea in India that could compete with tea from China, England stole secrets and hired spies like Robert Fortune to learn how to process tea leaves, and broke trust and treaties to use the tea market for their own gain.
The greedy trading community left tea laborers in poverty while they racked up profits of as much as 1,000 percent. The tragedy of trading tea for opium and illegal smuggling to avoid taxes links tea to trafficking and addiction. This link connects the work of Thistle Stop Café even more closely to the world of tea. It makes the serving of tea by survivors of trafficking and prostitution more significant.
The roots of human trafficking are fed by the world of drugs and housed in the human construct of poverty, just like tea. Thousands of young women are trafficked and prostituted annually. Now is the right time to call the community together and open the first café that reaches across the world to restore tea and the women serving it. This awareness combined with the serving of justice tea by women who know what injustice feels and tastes like will help us move into the national movement we long to be. The women and girls who have survived trafficking and prostitution need community to heal. Because they do not heal without economic independence, there is a great need for more social enterprises in communities where the ongoing well-being of the workforce is the primary mission and survivors are able to earn living wages.
This café, if done well, might help the national conversation regarding trafficking and prostitution. Rereading that line, I recognize that this language sounds so much bigger than the reality of opening a café, but tea demands a large contextual setting. Drinking tea allows us to be poetic and think big. The café can offer a sense of place. From these walls we can launch national podcasts, a Shared Trade Alliance, a growing workforce, flash tea parties, and awareness campaigns to help bring more communities to action. I feel strong as I dream of a cup of tea being served from that space. We need to feel small things strongly to keep big things moving forward.
The women who will serve this tea will have spent, on average, ten years on the street prostituting themselves to support addictions and have lengthy records of arrest or incarceration. We know before we even meet them that they will have experienced physical and sexual assault and will have been trafficked on the dead-end street where poverty runs into the wall of justice. Fired up by the history of injustice in tea and trafficking, we can’t wait to open a beautiful sanctuary that serves up justice with every cup. The community that helped harm the women and trade tea unfairly can damn well help heal the women, too.
This conviction and passion are the launching pad for inspiration to move into a full-fledged fundraising effort and bring this dream to fruition. Much of the money donated so far is from women who love the idea of a café. They may be in recovery, they may come from a farm, their moms may have loved tea, but they see this as a place honoring every woman’s story and hope. The café appeals to a sense of justice, with a bit of ambiance. In general, capital money is easier to raise than program money. It is easier for folks to think about starting something new as opposed to paying for the old. I love the stories that are coming in with the donations and find that there are more people out there than I ever imagined who want to taste justice tea poured in hope into a beautiful old teacup.
Every so often I catch a glimpse of the difference this café will make in the lives of the women. I recently took a walk through the woods with a graduate of the Magdalene program I hadn’t seen in a while. I brought along two cups of tea steeped to a perfect golden brown. As we were walking and talking about the reality of this café, I realized we were sharing a communion with the birds and flowers. We had slowed our pace, had taken tiny sips of tea, and were almost whispering our conversation like a prayer. The space was like an altar for St. Francis or a tea set with perfect floral arrangements: vivid greens and the stunning blend of butter yellow and periwinkle that makes the back of your teeth clench with joy. She told me while we were walking that tea was coming into her life when she needed a new good habit. She said she had given up so much to be a part of this community, it was nice to welcome something she could take on with no guilt.
It’s as if tea can’t help itself. In its pure simplicity, it calls you to slow down, to pay attention, and to listen. As we were walking, we traveled back to her past, talked about her future longings, and dreamed of what the café might be like. After the walk, I thought about the gift of having time. Time is the gift we offer when we think we have tons of it. We can lavish time on friends and listen to their stories and walk and sip tea. It’s when time feels scarce that we make a run on it like rationed gas and find ourselves with less and less of it to spare. Tea opens us the time to have the conversation that brings us to intimacy and community with our tea-drinking friends.
The woman who birthed me was twelve when I was born in 1982. She had six more children and all of us were placed in foster care. I only know one of my siblings. I was in and out of seven different foster homes. I don’t remember having friends or toys, just being molested in each home. I didn’t know that was wrong because no one told me. I never spoke a word. I held it all in. I went up for adoption to a better home with nice people. She wanted me to call her Mom. In the other homes there was no such word as “Mom”!
The lady didn’t know what she was getting herself into when she adopted my sister and me. I came with a lot of baggage and was unable to receive love from others. It was like a foreign language. She tried, and I had good food to eat, a nice home, and nice things. Then her brothers came down from Detroit and babysat us while Mom was working overtime. I was molested again, and I still didn’t know I should tell someone. My behavior became very bad. I would get in fights at school. I’d see someone getting picked on and I felt the need to step in, I think because I wished for the longest time someone would step in and help me. One day in class a teacher talked about adults touching you. She said it was wrong and that you should tell someone. I had never heard that. I spoke to her because I felt like holding that information inside was killing me softly. When my mom found out, she blamed it on me, and it felt like she didn’t want to deal with it. I ran away at the age of fifteen, mad at the world. One thing I knew was I knew how to please men. I ran with that.
Before my eighteenth birthday, I was getting high every day and neglecting the two children I had birthed. My kids were placed with friends of mine. I lost my home and went to the streets. That’s when I learned quickly how to survive and not get run over. I had to do what I had to do to get quick money for my drug habit. This went on for years and years. I got arrested and looked at jail as a place of rest. I got a felony for selling drugs and served nine months. I went back out on paper, didn’t do the right thing, and ended up back in jail for eleven months. That is when I sat down and asked God to come into my life and help me stay clean. I got into all the programs and classes to help me become a better person on the inside.
While I was in jail, I wrote the Magdalene program asking for help. The whole time I was working on the issues of my past. Today, I believe the story is not over in my life. God allowed me to go through things only to carry me from them and be a help to others. He was working in my life and I’m glad my past didn’t dictate the ending of my story.
—Anika