Tea of Consciousness

It’s 2 AM and I can’t sleep because the words are whirling around inside me like moths looking for an open window.  Writing a post for this blog – I was going to write something about Yellow Tea – has been on my to-do list every day for a long time and I keep trying to start but I keep getting stopped because at the end of the day, the thing I’m writing, it can’t really be what it is because when I’m writing it it feels like an advertisement.  That’s not to say it has to be, but that’s how it was feeling.  So I guess I’m A Little Teapost is going all gonzo meta-tea blog for a while, maybe forever. 

I’m not a naturally disciplined person.  The only way I can convince myself to do something every day is to make it into some kind of ritual – something that you do for its own sake, because it’s sacred, without any anticipation of a material outcome.  

Somehow, promoting myself or my business never felt “sacred” to me, it actually feels very profane on a deep level.  Marxist leanings aside, it’s a personal thing – I’ve tried to approach it with an attitude of sanctity, but it just doesn’t take.  It’s like trying to stick something to the fridge with a Lego.  That doesn’t mean I don’t believe it can be a good, positive thing – some of the best things in life are profane:  Sex, Doritos, pooping.  But to my mind the most profane of all things is money, and the world we live in is one dominated by money, wherein acquiring ever-increasing amounts of capital is an absolute necessity.  Without it, bills pile up, you go into debt, and you’re driven into a kind of existential slavery.  Either you find some way to make money or you’re chewed between the gears of the great Free Market like a pomegranate seed in the teeth of a laughing Shah.

So here I find myself, “balls deep in Capitalism”, as they say.  Importing tea was a natural step for me because I love tea and I had possession of one of the hardest pieces of the puzzle:  direct contact with Chinese tea farmers.  But I don’t just love tea; tea is one of the things I love the most.  I almost love it too much to sell it.  It’s been my hobby, my spiritual practice, and my main form of social interaction for more than a decade.  Selling it puts my ideals at odds with themselves.  Even just two sentences ago, when I mentioned my farm contacts, the affected voice of a used car salesman emerged in my internal narrative, replacing my own voice.  I find myself upon the horns of a dilemma, which is something I always wanted to be able to say I found myself upon.

I’ve resolved this internally by two routes.  The first is based on the postulate {Tea is good for people, therefore, it is good to sell tea to the people}. Even if you don’t invest as much spiritual significance in it as I do, it has been found repeatedly to have beneficial effects on human health, and that’s SCIENCE.  So, even if I’m selling it, at least it’s not hurting people, it’s helping them.  That’s really good and so is spreading tea culture, because tea culture is beautiful and practicing the elegant traditions of other cultures enriches people.  That’s super subjective but I believe it to be true and that’s what really counts, right?  It gives people a way to socialize without alcohol or substances, and teaches patience, quiet reflection, and the appreciation of austere luxury.  And it’s also Chinese culture, which helps promote unity and cultural understanding.  Thusly do I assuage my raging inner Socialist, who remains skeptical.

The second route is based on the postulate {Once the company makes enough money we’ll buy land and establish an alternative society}.  I’m not going to get super into that, because it would be premature, but it’s going to involve a tea farm, badass little wood and earth Chinese houses, aquaponics, and a zeppelin.  What it won’t involve – at least not the actual tea farm and its associated community – is money.  The goal is not to acquire money but to transcend it.  That said, everything leading up to the establishment of the farm will involve rampant money-making, because if you want to make a place where you don’t have to use money, you have to first have a place, and places cost money. This is Phase III of the company’s business model and I’ve been hesitant to talk about it publically but I figure it’s not like tons of people read I’m A Little Teapost.  Anyone who’s willing to read this far through so much stream-of-consciousness nonsense can be privy to my deep-seated counter-Capitalist Utopian ambitions.  Anyways, it’s getting too frustrating to keep on keeping it a secret.  I feel like a chump because trying to hustle things all used-car style is chumpy in the extreme.  I’m not giving up, I’m not saying that the world is ok the way it is and that I’m just going to make my way in it the best I can because it’s all we can do after all.  I’m just building up enough rocket fuel to get a ship out of orbit, far from the gravitational pull of money and the need for propulsion.  It just takes a lot of rocket fuel to get there.

So I’m going to let I’m A Little Teapost be whatever it wants to be.  I’ll just do something in it every day.  I can’t promise it will be good or interesting or even, as this post turned out, mostly about tea.  But it won’t be advertising.  It’ll just be me, talking about my life and my company and whatever else as I attempt to Judo-flip the American dream.  

I also write monthly for a widely-read tea blog, T Ching.  They encourage me to promote myself through my blog contributions and I’m going to ignore the Looney Tunes theme song that cranks to life in my head as I shamelessly promote it to coincide with my latest article being published and post the link, www.Tching.com. I’ll try to keep Business So-Han on that side of the internet. 

Thanks for reading,

Regular So-Han