Drinking a Cup of Tea

The guided writing ‘experiment’ for this winter season involves drinking a cup of tea. Simple eh? The simplicity of the subject will allow us to hone our skills, to get power into the words; its spaciousness will enable the reader to feel deeply.

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Close observation

Writing well, regardless of genre or subject, begins with knowing how to observe closely. That’s as true in fiction as in factual writing; there you could say it’s remembered or imagined observation. It’s also true regardless of genre. We initially have to bring our reader/listener into the present moment in any story or poem. Close observation is our anchor and jumping-off point into any stories we bring in from the past or future and embed in the ‘now’.

However, if you’re anything like me you might at this moment be noticing the half-finished, cold cup of tea that you shoved to the back of your desk; the one that you don’t even remember drinking. From there it can seem a long way to go to be present and find words for the tea. But don’t be discouraged! Don’t use it as a reason not to sit down and write. No-one has ideal writing conditions.

Take, for example, Matsuo Bashō, the renowned haiku poet (I’ll be quoting him later). We might imagine he was a hermit, far from worldly concerns, sipping tea on a mountain top. But he wasn’t. He was a servant and then a teacher. His chosen form of artistic expression was considered lowly, and he struggled to find peace of mind. He was dealing with the messiness of life; just like me and you. Trying to just get one moment’s peace to drink his tea and write about it–just like you and me.

Organismic self-regulation

So why do you think we make cups of tea in the first place? Thirst is one possibility, but if it was your third cup of tea this morning the answer could also be, perhaps surprisingly, that your eyes were tired from too much screen or that you were overwhelmed by information overload. Your animal-human nature was employing tea-making as a magnificent strategy–not necessarily the ideal one but the best it could find in the moment–to solve whatever imbalance or tension it experienced and to bring your system back to equilibrium.

With little effort and–if your mind was taken by other things–on automatic, your autonomic nervous system got you moving. When you connected with your body or sensory impressions in the environment, you shook off and processed the emotions or rested your eyes.

Attention into words

Part of that process of organismic self-regulation involves attention going out and moving fluidly between thoughts, sensory impressions, body sensations, feelings and the firing of muscles to action. In doing that, your body-mind reassures itself that it’s not in danger, or it takes what it needs from the environment, or it just assuages its curiosity. Attention then drops back, naturally, to a broader sense of itself at rest. It’s like a bird taking off, circling, and alighting on a branch before launching off again. The body and mind–often without conscious effort and in myriad ways–are always taking care of themselves.

The process of ‘good’ writing is another form of orienting back to health. That’s because words are, in essence, thoughts made solid. And thoughts are closely connected with where our attention goes. Thoughts follow attention and words follow thoughts.

Below is Sandra Marchetti’s poem Tea. Notice how our attention is taken to, and moves between, sight, taste, body sensation, internal image and thought. Between the lines and at the end of each sentence, we come back to ourselves.

My breath skates

across the glass,

golden scales push off

in electric bright

rifles at dawn.

I sip the flowers.

They flesh

in a way I see

when deposed of you,

carefully.

Now is the time for silence

of recognition—

the wintering observation.

I am a centering figure

bright to catch.

The lit wick of you

sleeps in another country.

I look at the glass,

watch a flower unfurl

and darkly lit, I fall.

You might also like to try taking flight in that way with the evocative poem Storming in Tea-cups by Meena Kandasamy.

So, at the basis, all we have to do to write well is to live well or, to be more precise in this context, drink that cup of tea in touch with the natural process of orienting towards health, of resolving tension in the body and mind. And then channel the words in our head on to the page.

Wishing you the warmth of creativity through the winter, of words gestating in the dark until they are ready to meet the light :)

To access the guided writing experiments that go out with the Wild Words quarterly newsletters, sign up here to receive the newsletter.

Enter your writing on the subject of ‘tea’ into the Wild Words Summer Solstice 2023 Competition.

Image courtesy of Wild Words photographer Peter Reid.