Chapter Five
TEA’S MYSTERIOUS CALLING
A White Tea Blend
One of the purest and oldest teas is white tea. White tea is dried without any fermentation and is the least processed of any tea. It is picked early in the year while the tiny white hairs are still visible on the leaves and the bud is still closed. Only the top leaf and a bud are picked from the plant. The leaves dry in the sun briefly.
White tea is perfect blended with organic fruits and flowers. One of my favorite combinations is blueberries and dried cornflowers mixed into the tea. Buy white teas already blended or mix dried flowers and fruits into the blend yourself.
Steep the white tea in the pot for just 1 to 2 minutes.
Serve with a bit of honey if desired to keep the beautiful and light flavor.
A GROUP FROM THISTLE FARMS returned from a week in England where we participated in a global conference. For two of the women, it was their first journey overseas. They didn’t even think about jet lag when their feet touched the ground. They headed off on a double-decker bus to see the palace, where they waved the Union Jack. The conference itself was a beautiful gathering of twenty thousand folks committed to working for justice and peace. Healing happens one person at a time in the small local work of the thousand groups gathered that together seemed like a grassroots movement big enough to change the balance of love in the world. Those small communities all gathered together embodied the idea that hope itself can make a difference. In addition to the conference, it was a great gift that Marcus, my beloved husband, was able to play music and take a couple of days off to share tea with me in some of the oldest teahouses and pubs in the Western world. England is a mecca of tea. Traveling there to drink tea is like heading to Rome to see an old church or going to Peru to see ruins.
England is steeped in tea culture. Tea was introduced to England by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. Soon the love of tea spread to Ireland and Scotland, where today more tea per capita is consumed than anywhere else in the world. Teahouses began in the eighteenth century and ensured tea’s place as part of the social and political culture of England.
At the end of the conference, my husband and I took a train and stayed in Oxford. The first day, we took afternoon tea in an old, famous pub called the Eagle and Child. This pub opened in the seventeenth century and is famous for being the home pub of a group of writers and scholars known as the Inklings. The two most famous members of the group are J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, who became friends while they were both professors. I sat at the table next to where the sign said they sat. I let my Earl Grey tea steep in the history of the place where they talked about theology and fantasy and interwove them into a sacred space called story. The pub itself was dark and old, and it was easy to move out of time as I sipped the rich black tea. The oak floor, benches, walls, and tables were blackened by time and cigar ash and aged in such a graceful way that they looked like holy relics.
Drinking tea and daydreaming as I leaned against the dark paneled walls, I half expected to see Tolkien and Lewis saunter in and begin a conversation that carried them through long, rainy afternoons. Friends coming by to sate their thirst for banter, I imagined, might interrupt their conversation from time to time. In one of the scars on the flooring beside their table, I imagined Tolkien leaning his chair back whenever Lewis offered a thought that felt too provincial to Tolkien. The leaning back on two legs time after time finally dented the floor. Maybe the scar on the floor on the other side of the table came from Lewis pushing the table away to stretch as Tolkien began reading. Those scars felt like outward and visible signs that Tolkien and Lewis were still present in this place through their ideas and works that have outlived them.
They probably entered the pub after walking along the sidewalk past the cemetery of St. Giles’ Church just down the street. This church is almost a thousand years old and has its own graveyard. The tombstones in the yard are so old that lichens are the only markings left on many. Maybe the walk by those old stones was the procession that fueled Tolkien and Lewis to write powerfully and poetically enough to find immortality and be spared the truth that even headstones return to dust eventually. I imagine that when they left the pub, their conversations played over in their minds as they went back to the lonely task of writing and editing. I love that in this pot of tea, a story has poured out and that its aroma mixed with the scent of blackened oak carries us out of time and into imagination.
Sitting under the influence of great writers, I sipped my tea as slowly as I could, almost tasting my fate. My fate, like that of all of us, is to lie beneath a stone whose lettering will eventually wear off so that we rest in peace. When we let it sink into the back of our heart it leaves us shaking in the valley of the shadow of death. The thought reminds us that we want to live our best with the time we have been given and to savor every single cup of tea we are allowed to taste. In my mind, I can hear Lewis and Tolkien talking about death and life for hours. Somehow the echoes of their conversations bring a sweet taste to what might otherwise be a bitter broth.
If people like Tolkien and Lewis had been daunted by their own mortality and had not believed in the hope of eternal love, this pub and these old black floors may have been forsaken a long time ago. If they had not faced their own mortality with courage, our lives would be poorer. If they had not dared to contemplate the hardest questions of theology and just thrown a pint back to ward off thought, they never would have dreamed of Lord of the Rings or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Their lives call us to imagine, over a pot of tea, not just them but the whole universe and God. When our imagination conjures up hope and heroic acts of love in the face of death, we are moved to action. Tolkien and Lewis knew death, yet they lived with amazing imaginations and allowed their ideas to grow in words on paper. History, time, and death call us to live deep in our imaginations and allow inspired action to move us undaunted. We are passing through and will share in the journey of becoming ashes. But before that journey, we are alive, and in our finitude we can imagine the infinite and unknown. We can imagine history and the future and be stirred by ghosts. We can hold an abiding hope through it all and be moved to do some of our greatest work. Hope seeps through scarred oak and dark tea.
Neither Lewis nor Tolkien had any idea that the path to Oxford was leading them to a deep friendship that would change their course forever. We rarely know that our friendships, made by circumstance and chance, offer us the opportunity to dream of new worlds where fanciful ideas of justice can thrive. The story of Lewis and Tolkien sharing tea and dreaming of new worlds emboldens all of us to dream big. Three minutes from the small pub is the thousand-year-old church dedicated to Mary Magdalen, the saint who symbolizes the healing power of love. She is depicted in beautiful and timeless stained glass overlooking the pub. For a millennium this shrine dedicated to the first preacher of the Gospels and the one for whom Jesus lingered at the tomb has been casting radiant light and reminding pilgrims that love can transform the world. Her image can carry weary mortal souls through the valley and lay them on the path of hope. She cries out to Lewis and Tolkien, you and I, that although injustices in this world seem immovable, with love all things can change and all hearts are flesh. She offers me a space to feel that even though the injustices associated with trafficking and tea are entrenched and continue to this day, we can hope and work toward a freer world. We don’t have to be intimidated by what looks like unchangeable forces.
By the time I returned home, that inspiration had solidified into a plan called Shared Trade that would launch with the café. This new venture of Thistle Farms would be dedicated to fairer trade in the worlds of tea and social enterprises that employ women. The Shared Trade alliance would simply be a coalition of organizations focused on women and dedicated to bringing women permanently out of poverty through sustainable employment. Participating groups are enterprises trying to close the gap between producers and consumers in the value chain. Small and large social enterprises around the globe could come together in the alliance to share best practices and marketing strategies for economic leverage. We would act globally so women feel freedom locally. In other words, organizations working with women tea farmers in Uganda, or a sewing cooperative in Kenya, or an oil producer in Rwanda, or a café in Nashville would promise to work together to further all our endeavors while prioritizing work on increasing the wages of the working women.
Our notion of fair trade in tea is different from fair trade in other commodities like coffee or bananas. Fair trade in the world of tea is an underdeveloped path that has yielded to the historical precedent of servant labor established hundreds of years before. Fair trade is the official name of a federation that is building equitable and sustainable trading partnerships and creating opportunities to alleviate poverty around the globe. Shared trade would be taking that notion a bit deeper as specific social enterprises dedicated to the workforce as the primary mission would go beyond the requirements of existing fair trade. Social enterprises in which women are both the workforce and the beneficiaries in the United States have, on average, three to five employees. That means that executive directors are also the marketers, trainers, and administrators. It also means that most of the organizations are underproducing, so it’s hard for the struggling social enterprises to pay the women living wages or hours. By collectively and specifically supporting one another, we can help all our organizations. Through this new Shared Trade initiative at Thistle Farms we would enable more small social enterprises that enable women to increase their economic leverage, train regional sales teams to promote one another’s products, and develop branding power. When people see products stamped with Shared Trade, they will know that the work’s mission is to help foster healing for women survivors. These goals will allow organizations in the alliance to have a marketing strategy to actually grow their companies and to increase their potential customers and donor database. One of the reasons why tea is picked by hand instead of with mechanical pickers is because traditionally the pickers are women with no political or social status.
Even in fair trade operations like in Sri Lanka, some workers live on land owned by companies that also own the school and health care, so they wield great power over the workers. Other workers in places like Kenya still live in poverty on dirt floors without access to clean water. I have seen tea pickers in rural communities in northern Kenya who still don’t have enough money to buy school uniforms. Families must seek out not-for-profits to get the clothing their children need to attend grade school. Some argue that tea pickers are doing better than their poorer neighbors and that picking tea is an economic step up. But large tea corporations in Kenya and Sri Lanka have been documented as hiring pickers only on a temporary basis, so they never receive the benefits claimed by full-time company employees. There are stories of inadequate equipment and unsafe working conditions. Pesticides used by large tea companies compromise the health of the workers and the plants.
Formulating a shared trade idea, hiring a manager for the café, and finding new funding sources is bringing new life to the original idea. The idea of an alliance has given me hope that cup by cup we will get this venture going and move forward on this path.
In the midst of grand ideas there was still the issue that we needed to lay a new floor in the café area. The old floor had been ruined in the Nashville flood of 2010 and was unusable. We had to find a donor since our construction budget continued to increase just for all the electrical, plumbing, and new construction that needed to happen. The floor we found comes from an old tobacco warehouse owned by Al Gore’s parents. It has been a huge job to lay it, sand it, and seal it, but that has worked itself out. The floor has now become part of the long and mysterious path by which this café came together, as these very beams began their journey 150 years ago when some tall red pines in California were hewn and brought to the hills of Tennessee. They will lie on this floor for decades to come, I hope, until they become as old and stained as the floors in the old Oxford pub. Maybe on these very floors, over a cup of a deep earth-colored tea, two people will begin a friendship that carries them to places they never would have dreamed of. Maybe one will write about a new world that the other happened to mention when describing a dream he or she had the night before. Maybe years later searching pilgrims will come and sit in the café where they heard these two friends were known to visit. Those young pilgrims will take note of the floor, of the old teacups, and carry the dream of hope out the door to another generation of people.
As we travel a path, there are moments, as in the pub in Oxford or standing by a whistling kettle, when we wake up to ourselves. Before that moment, we didn’t know we were asleep. Afterward, we are startled to find out how long we were out. It’s just like when you’re driving down the road and can’t remember how you got there. How do any of us get to where we are right now in the first place? How do any of us get to exactly right here? The path from there to here is not like Robert Frost’s sweet image in his poem “The Road Not Taken” about choosing the simple single path others haven’t worn out. When we wander around, it feels like the forks in the road are as complex as branches on an old oak tree.
The paths in our lives might begin with a single fork in the trunk of a tree at its base, but soon that fork has forks within forks until there are a thousand branches growing in different directions. The first paths aren’t even paths we choose; they are chosen for us. Some are hidden or at least unknown to us. Paths can twist and turn until we end up on a road we can’t find on a map or remember wanting to travel on. There we are, out on a limb, hanging on, and we can’t remember how we got there.
In the twists and turns of the mysterious path, we awaken to that very moment and see clearly where we are on the road. In those moments, it’s possible for the wild and shady roads to be the platform onto a new path of healing and hope. Self-reflection, community, ritual, and grace fuel such moments. I have seen women in the circle of Thistle Farms identify those moments on the path as a long process they recognize only when they see it in the rearview mirror. The knowledge that all paths can lead to wholeness and healing is of great comfort to me. It means no one lives outside the bounds of hope and all of us live within the borders of love. We can all find our way. In this context, healing becomes a sacramental walk toward wholeness. The hardest part is believing that we are heading somewhere holy as we are walking. Tea is such a great companion for pilgrims on the way and has been central to so many people on the journey. Its healing properties, warmth, aromatic gifts, and still-filled nature can be a great tool to help us awaken to ourselves and see where we are. Tea is the place where we can stop and become aware that all the forks in the road, all the blessings and brokenness, have led us to where we are and that where we are is a fine place to begin.
One of the Thistle Farms women, Dorris, describes living for twenty-six years and never leaving a ten-block radius. She thought she would end up somewhere different, but she kept ending up in the same spot. It began, she said, when, as a child, she witnessed the violent death of a parent. The trauma made the forks in the road impossible to discern. Fear and shame kept her pretty lost. But three years ago, she chose a different road and ended up at Magdalene, where she says that her road became a path of healing the past so she could move forward.
Dorris was on the same old path where she wore out her shoes and her body. The problem in waking up to yourself and finding a new path is that all new roads look frightening. Somehow, by God’s grace, all of the roads both Dorris and I have traveled led us to the shore of the Gulf Coast. In all of the injustices she has seen and all of the searching she has done, her road less traveled never took her to the beach. It feels close to a miracle that our combined side roads crossed in that moment so I got to hold her hand as her feet touched the sugar sand for the first time. Her very first words were “Good job, God” as she tried to take in the whole gulf through eyes filled with tears. When she felt the pull of the waves on her feet she stretched out her arms and in a lilting voice asked, “Has it been doing this my whole life?” I thought, “My Lord, yes. As long as the moon has been orbiting the earth the tide has been coming. It just takes making our way to the shore to feel how powerful it is.” While she was walking in circles for years, she had no idea that the tide, like love, has been pulling her toward freedom. I laughed as she bent down and picked up a seashell and said she couldn’t believe that God put a hole in the shell just so she could string it on a necklace. It felt like a beautiful and simple thought that all roads lead to the shore eventually. Just then a blue heron flew and I felt the need to genuflect as its path to this shore was worth pondering as well.
It would be amazing to trace our journeys not just from our childhood or our own ancestry but to see where the path began, before the first fork in the road. If we could trace the path that far, then we could see the connection in the thousands of paths that are really all forks from a single path. Looking over that journey, we might get a better perspective on just how unbelievably random it is that we are here, in this fleeting moment, doing this exact thing.
As Dorris and I walked the beach, studying a piece of driftwood, I realized that the wood lying there is simply a limb from the many forks in the tree. Even the branch is fleeting. I was flooded with the thoughts of fleeting time like the waves coming into the shore. I wondered if the people walking along the sand sensed our connectedness and the randomness that had led us all to be on the beach at that exact moment in time.
It’s no wonder there are so many ways to get off track and choose one fork that takes you flying toward a vulnerable north-exposed branch. But I was there on that beach, and I did not feel lost. Instead, being there was an answer to a long prayer. I felt grounded and knew that all the brokenness of my childhood, including the death of my father and the abuse by a church elder, were not outside the realm of grace. They were part of the first roots of the tree and my own first memory that serves as the trunk. Those memories and a million more allowed me to climb out onto this tender limb and see how love moves us. The thousand choices I have made led me to that moment on that stretch of beach and time that reminded me I was right where I was supposed to be; walking hand in hand with a woman feeling the eternal tide pull her toward love.
Few metaphors better capture this feeling than tea. As Dorris and I shared a cup of tea later and laughed about our experience, we are retracing forks in the road that lead back through a direct line a couple thousand years into the woods above the Mekong River in southwestern China. The path was as hard and dangerous as the path the woman beside me has walked. Many twists and turns of that path have inflicted pain. It was a path of exploitation and drugs, a path laden with misery and hardship. It was a path that led to new discovery, new enterprises, and new life. The path of going toward tea in the East is called the roji, or garden path. This path is critical to the experience of tea. It is peaceful and leads us to tea with intention.
The path of tea lies in juxtaposition to the wild and unintentional path the women at Thistle Farms have walked. There was nothing fair in the trade when they swapped their childhoods for the streets and sold their bodies for the numbing drugs that would help them forget the path they were on. Those traumas become the yellow brick road that leads to prison and wandering in circles. Sometimes our path is foisted upon us, and then the journey becomes how to make choices to heal from the path we were given. When someone argues that prostitution is a choice and I think about friends like Dorris, I always ask, “What were the other choices?”
A graduate of the program talks with grace about the path she was given. She described it as “really, really, really rough.” Her dad died from cancer and her mom was schizophrenic. She said people just came into their house and slept with her mom and abused her. She left for the streets to make her own way, she says, but truly her path was laid out before her.
When I was fourteen years old, I started using drugs and alcohol to cope with the things I was dealing with in life. I lived in a very dysfunctional environment, and my mom was mentally ill. This caused me great pain because she was unable to care for my siblings and me. With all of the distress, I started medicating my agony and anger away with drugs and alcohol.
In addition, I started walking the streets all hours of the night and prostituting my body for money. I would jump in and out of cars with men I did not know. When I was finished I would have them drop me off at the next corner. As time went by, I became comfortable with the lifestyle that I was living, which lasted for fifteen years.
One day a guy that I had sex with for money introduced me to one of his friends. I was supposed to have sexual intercourse with him, but instead that person told me about the Magdalene program and Thistle Farms. After hearing about this, I made the phone call and immediately got into the program. That is when my life began to change. I received the help I needed and got a sponsor. I went to twelve-step meetings and the greatest thing happened to me: I found God, who became my best friend. He healed my mind, body, and spirit. He put back together what was broken into pieces, and now I know how to love others. Now I live the way God wants me to live.
Furthermore, I am blessed to say that I will be a proud employee of the Thistle Stop Café. When I walk into the café, I know that God’s love endures forever right inside of every teacup that is held in someone’s hand. There is a great story in everyone—a story that can heal all self-destructive behavior and a story that can save someone’s life.
—Anonymous
It’s hard to face the times when it’s not fight or flight, it’s just us wrestling with our own shadows and making peace. On our spiritual path, this is the place we are eventually led to sit with ourselves and drink from the cup we have been offered. Love is in this cup, as it is in all the cups we have been given. It’s time to taste it and figure out the next graceful step. No matter how any of us got where we are, our spiritual paths remind us we are in a good spot to learn about love. That is a universal truth that grounded us on the path to opening the new café.
We still need about 25 percent more capital, and our plans still need work. I pray new tea can be laid like bread crumbs along the way and not only lead women forward but help us find our way home. We talk at Thistle Farms quite often about how it is not a problem to be lost; it is only a problem if you think you can’t find your way home. Tea can be a tool that helps us navigate the path, the roji, all the way back to our hearts. We can find ourselves on that path and make our way to sanctuary and safety. It is a spiritual axiom that old paths can lead us to new places. The old truth that Jesus preached about loving our neighbors led the disciples to walk a new way. It still calls us to walk the path that leads to a more just world.