Chapter Thirteen
POURING OUT
A Recipe for Forage Tea
Sometimes when you are traveling in the woods and hillsides, it’s fun to think about what herbs and spices you can forage for that might make a great tea. It’s also a great experience just to go into a local market and ask for té. On an annual pilgrimage thirty of us make to the Los Ríos area of Ecuador, four women, including myself and my best friend Tara, went foraging. We collected chamomile blossoms and ginger root from the market and then picked lemongrass we had planted two years before. You can gather all of these items in the United States. We also picked up some green tea and a few small limes.
We boiled water in a big pot and steeped the roots and herbs for about ten minutes. The exact amount is still unclear to me because we just added what we had. The next step was to add three green tea bags we had packed with us and let the whole mixture steep for another three to five minutes. Then we poured it all through a strainer into another old pot we found. It was delicious. What made the beverage even sweeter was sharing the pot with the four local women who have been cooking for the group for the past two days. This silly foraged tea was enough to make them stop, sit, and sip the brew with us. We laughed and watched as one of the women finished nursing her baby and spooned a bit of tea into the child’s mouth. We sat for about fifteen minutes learning names and sharing recipes. Foraging tea will gather a group and settle a body in travel stress.
THE WORK JUST DOESN’T end; you make tea, drink tea, and before you know it, you are thirsty again. That is what life feels like sometimes: a never-ending thirst that is part of the human condition. It is a thirst for something still a bit out of our reach and something that will fill an emptiness that lingers somewhere between our heads and our hearts. It is a thirst to feel success and wealth on a scale measured by others. It is in this longing that tea really shines. Tea was meant to be poured out, created to soothe the weary spirit, and brewed to satiate our hunger for meaning. Somewhere along even our best journeys of hope there are days we want to call it quits and tune out. Those are the days to make new resolutions, take mini-tea retreats, and then go ahead and pour out our hearts again for love’s sake.
Such a day came to me while in a meeting with the head of a foundation who came to visit the café site. Since construction has been delayed due to codes and unforeseen issues, costs have increased, and we have had to go out and find donors to cover salaries for the people hired and waiting for us to open. In the meeting, the man said some nice things about the work but then said that his foundation is concerned that Thistle Farms is trying to do too much instead of focusing on what we already do. He said to me, “Less may be more in this circumstance.” I had just finished showing him where the construction was in full swing and served him a steaming cup of rich black tea. I defended our actions quickly and explained that the café was the continuation of the vision of serving. His criticism was too late, but truth be told, it hurt when he said that his “circle of peers” had discussed the café and me. It meant there were folks who thought we shouldn’t or couldn’t pull it off. He explained he just wanted to let me know the concerns “out there” so I wouldn’t be blindsided.
Maybe he is right that we are trying to be too big or do too much. Maybe we’re just searching for the next thing that will sate our thirst for success. Maybe we are overstating our ability to serve justice tea and our contribution to a national movement. But maybe he is wrong. Perhaps, in order to sustain a social enterprise, you have to continue to grow. I believe that opening a café is exactly the right thing since we are not only creating products but place. I believe the café can help launch the movement for women’s freedom into full gear with Shared Trade and through offering hospitality to the strangers who will come from all over the world to taste hope.
But whether he was right or wrong, what was striking to me was that as he sat there and offered me words to contemplate, he forgot the biggest view of the picture. It’s not whether we can be sustained or not, but how it is impossible to sustain a community without taking care of the women who have been broken by people who can look at numbers and fail to see the real bottom line. The real bottom line to me is that no community is well that thinks prostitution is a victimless crime or that we bear no responsibility as a nation in bringing the women safely home. But he kept talking about the need for us to be sustainable, as if he did not bear some part in that equation. I hope someday to invite him into the café, sit down with a proper pot of tea, and offer him one of the sweetest cups of healing tea he has ever tasted. Maybe he will see the great gift he offered the women in the form of the grant and how much better this world is because the women are healing.
The feeling that came over me as he left was not anger but a desire to pour more of my heart into the café. I want to pour tea out as a symbol of how we can love well, even if someone does not accept it. I want to pour tea out not just for this executive, but for all the occasions and for all the people to whom I have said hurtful things. Just the idea that tea is poured out of a pot is enough to contemplate over a cup. Tea is poured out, not meted out in small helpings, as is the case with other foods or even people. It is a Christian notion that an offering is poured out for the sake of the well-being of another. Tea becomes a symbol of the nature of sacrificial love. In the Gospels, Jesus said His blood was “poured out” for the sake of forgiveness. We were created to be poured out. What if every time we poured a pot of tea for a stranger or friend, we were forgiving ourselves and others as freely as the leaves release their healing gifts? Imagine if we could see our heart being poured out with the tea. This could make the world a better place. An idea has been brewing for months that Thistle Farms can host “flash tea parties”: unexpected tea events where we pour out tea for strangers and invite them to sit and feel the hospitality and peace tea can offer.
Being poured out for others is a quintessential image of giving in the Gospels. Before Jesus enters Jerusalem, He stops to visit Lazarus, Mary, and Martha. As they’re gathered along with guests, Mary takes out an expensive bottle of nard worth the equivalent of $6,000 in today’s economy. Mary pours the costly fragrance over Jesus’ feet and wipes them with her hair. The liquid must have spilled out onto the floor. The act seems outlandish until we realize that she is preparing Him for burial; then it becomes an act of overwhelming gratitude and love. It feels like one of the most intimate and loving acts in all the Gospels. I imagine she wept as she poured the oil. She had to be pouring out her heart and laying all the hope and brokenness of her life at His feet.
One of the disciples criticizes Mary. The money could have been spent on the poor. This is a hollow response to a generous act. They will still be able to offer charity to people who are poor and work for justice in the name of love. The moral issue is not offering a lavish gift to the people we love. The whole Gospel is rooted in the belief that the moral issue is our reaction to the suffering before us. The truth that Jesus and His disciples were devoted to the healing and serving of others was never in question. This lavish act of love by Mary teaches us how to serve. Her willingness to pour out a huge gift with humility and respect reminds us of our posture while pouring out our lives for the sake of others. Jesus ends the discussion by saying the poor will always be with us. That is a blessing, not a curse. There will always be Magdalene women with us. They will always find their way from the streets of hell to a sanctuary of love as long as we are able to keep such sanctuaries open. Every one of the women will be a blessing.
Mary’s pouring out of the oil onto the feet of Jesus leads us to a hallowed group. The story is a reminder to give extravagantly and lavish love on those we love but who won’t be with us forever. Mary was painfully aware that Jesus was heading toward Jerusalem and into the heart of the occupied nation to confront authority. She gave Him the best of what she had. Like Mary, we must learn to pour out our fine oils and our finest teas. With the dedication of a religious act, I have tried to pour out tea daily for my husband. Serving and pouring the tea are an act of great gratitude for me that he has walked with me this whole way without asking much of me in return. I pour his tea with a full heart and without any need for him to reciprocate this act. I carry the tea to our room early in the morning so he gets to drink it before he has to wake up to the all the demands that the day will bring. Pouring tea out for him feels different to me from just serving tea to a group. This is more humbling and intimate. It is a glimpse of what it means to love in a way that you could lay your life down for another without the person even asking.
There are so many ways that I don’t allow myself to be poured out. Ego creeps in and ruins perfectly good and humble tea that was willing to be steeped and poured for a friend. Those are the days I think I have just enough tea for myself or worry that the world may have short-served me or overcharged me for tea. Sometimes I think there is no reason to pour it out, because then I will have less. I don’t want to pour it for someone who has neither the inclination nor the education to appreciate the quality of tea offered. Sometimes I recollect the person has never given me a cup of tea. Other days I feel like my cup is not close to half full due to no fault of my own. It just feels like there is barely enough for me to get through the day. But truly those are the days we most need to pour out a whole pot of tea and offer it to someone with an open and grateful heart. It is on those days we learn the lessons of abundance: that love is poured out for us all and that all the tea in China doesn’t begin to match the quantity or quality of the mercy and love we have been given. When we empty ourselves, we are filled by a grace we didn’t know could rise in us. That is how we learn that whatever pots of tea we can pour for others are simply tokens of gratitude. Tea poured out is an offering of our hearts in gratitude for life. And so in the amount of time it takes to pour out a simple pot of tea, it is possible to reposition our hearts.
Tea poured out is poetry in action. And poetry becomes a state of being where the private longings of our hearts become loud enough for us to hear. To pour tea out is a sign that we want to experience this world like the poets themselves. Thoughts that begin as stirrings in our hearts barely above a soft whisper begin to simmer in a teapot. Once poured out and taken in, they become strong thoughts that ring in our ears like a loud wind. All the poetry and all the deep thoughts are right there, right there in the leaves steeping. The poetry of tea is there for our taking, but we have to be willing to stop and take a seat. We have to be willing to take the time to heat the water. We have to be open to a thought stirring as gently as a bit of honey melting in the bottom of a teacup.
It is in the act of pouring out tea like our love into this world that we can travel on a tea leaf and a prayer to poetry, centeredness, compassion, or whatever spiritual gift that needs watering. Tea poured out for others and ourselves is the outward and visible sign that we are tending to our interior life as well as serving our neighbors as ourselves. Pouring tea for ourselves is a ticket to travel with private visions and even fantasies that are not bound by time and space. We do not travel linearly, but where our spirit leads us. We may take flight and sip tea in Narnia with C. S. Lewis, drink with Mohandas Gandhi on the eve of independence, or even sip with Ernest Shackleton in the Weddell Sea at the South Pole. And we may just sit and daydream in the space we don’t put words to for others to read. Tea will travel with us to all those places, not just as a willing partner but as a wise guide. It is tea that allows those spaces and thoughts to move in us.
Tea is being poured out everywhere, even on the floor as a stain at Thistle Farms. The women are getting trained to pour chai tea lattes with heart-shaped foam. The new drywall is being installed, and the 150-year-old red pine floor from the tobacco barn of the warehouse of Al Gore Sr. is stacked and ready to be laid by a crew of a hundred volunteers. We have kept going even though there are still issues with codes and worries about money. “The more momentum we can build, the harder it will be to stop it” is the new theory. Once we pour our hearts and resources into this project, it will be impossible to get them back into the teapot!
This floor, carried and laid by volunteers, reminds me of the great pouring out of charity. The floor is made to be laid with tongue and groove, meaning each piece has a long rim on one side that must be sanded to fit perfectly into the groove on the next piece. It is time consuming and truly a labor of love. The contractor said he is not a fan of reclaimed wood, mostly because of the huge investment of time and patience required to lay it. In some ways using this floor is not the most economical approach. But it is a way for a hundred people who want to be a part of this unfolding story of hope to participate. We are going to put a coffee-and-tea stain on the wood to help bring it back to its old self after we lay and sand it. Volunteers pour their hearts into this floor, then for years will bring their friends and family into this space and see what they helped build. The logo came back from the volunteer designer and is simply a circle of tea leaves with “Thistle Stop Café” written in the middle. I do believe it’s just about perfect for us.
A wonderful landscape architect, Tara Armistead has designed an outdoor garden with trees to surround a deck, which is made from huge planters. This truly is going to be a stunning vision that is a sign that in community, there is great power and healing. The extravagance in charity lies in the way it blesses giver and receiver. The blessing in the act of doing charity for one another is that love is poured out on us all. So many people are pouring their time and talent and treasures into this café that it feels like it is becoming holy ground.
Another group of more than twenty-five volunteers are collecting the precious teacups, to use both as serving cups and as the principal interior design element. The group is tying them to strings, and making five chandeliers that will hang in the café, each a testament to how love that is poured out carries a deeper meaning that lasts well after the tea is gone. This café is teaching us all that holy ground comes from a community pouring out blessings and consecrating a space as sacred by words and deeds. Cemeteries are some of the holiest grounds in this world, places where people have been poured out and laid to rest. I saw the blossom of a huge thistle growing in a natural cemetery recently. Thistles have long been our symbol that a noxious weed that grows where the women we serve walk and sleep is filled with a beautiful purple center. The thistles are reminders to me that everything on God’s green earth is beloved.
Near the cemetery there are ten-foot-tall thistle plants that still haven’t bloomed. They are huge and stunning. I wanted to gather the whole community, hold hands, and sing our hearts out. I wanted us to sing because in the middle of even an old cemetery there is life, and it is powerful and stunning. These thistles have taproots that must reach down another ten feet. That means this plant, not yet fully grown, is over twenty feet high. The earth around it nurtures it. The plants’ forbearers offered their seeds from wind and rain to take root. This is how I see the community of Thistle Farms right now: twenty feet high and growing taller from the trials of opening new businesses, launching a national conference at Thistle Farms and the café, and burying friends and family this year. Our community was planted on rich soil, and we have nothing to fear. Our community is standing twenty feet tall, and it is a sign of love’s power and grace. I am holding all the women who still are on the streets and suffering in troubled fields from sexual violence, mental health, trauma, loneliness, and trafficking in my thoughts at the foot of this giant thistle.
Story and perseverance are part of what makes our thistle stand tall in the troubled fields of this world. With more gratitude and love than I have words for, I am a thistle farmer. I can imagine that this café, rooted as beautifully as this thistle and fed on the rich dirt of love in community, will be as big and stunning as thistles are. Later that same day I sat in a corner of the cemetery and drank a cup of green jasmine tea. It was as sweet and tender as the feelings that arose from seeing the thistle and glimpsing the powerful movement for women’s freedom we are building. It is easy to feel the gratitude for the pouring out of spirit that gives us life, thistles, and tea.
One other sign of the spirit pouring out is tears. At Thistle Farms, a woman had taken part of her paycheck to buy eyelashes. She said the next day at work, she was so full of the spirit of love that she laughed and cried so much that one set of them fell off. She said she had no idea two years ago that she could feel this happy. It is remarkable when you think about her story. She was sexually abused for years. Her journey continued, like that of so many women all over our small globe, to spiral out of her control until she realized she was going in and out of jail and nothing was changing. She has made a journey from horrific trauma on just about every level to knowing joy so fully she laughs until her fake eyelashes fall off. That epitomizes healing. She drank it in and took hold in her core until it poured out. She is the preacher who reminds me that being poured out does not leave a person empty. It leaves a fragrance that fills a room. It leaves memory so full that it fills the teller with gratitude. It leaves places of new insight that are worth more than the tea ever was.