by Cat Kerr

As I sip sencha and feel its steam on my face, its grassy fragrance awakening my senses and energizing me for the day ahead, I take my place at the kitchen window and watch the sun rising over the treeline. It’s the same sun that fostered the growth of these leaves on the other side of the world from where I’ve steeped them. A note of gratitude crosses my mind for the harvesters, processors, packagers, and transporters who made it possible for me to indulge in this time with my tea.  

In recent years, this has become my ritual — a moment early in the day, specially allocated for grounding and reflection. 

Tea has had a place in my life for as long as I can remember. In some of my earliest memories, my mother prepares English breakfast tea, sweetened with milk and a sugar cube, and serves it to me in a delicate ceramic cup before I’m off to school on a frigid and dark Midwest morning.

That was only the beginning. Flipping through the album of mental images I’ve retained from my life’s most defining events, I see I’m often accompanied by a cup of tea:

In one, I’m sitting at my best friend’s kitchen table near midnight. Our last year of high school starts in just a few months. The silence between us is diminished by a soft choir of crickets and frogs outside, signaling the height of summer, along with the kettle’s whistle as the water comes to a boil. My friend browses the tea drawer and selects chamomile for me. He realizes that’s better than asking me to choose—I’m too exhausted to make even the smallest decision after days of reeling from grief after the news of our classmate’s suicide. 

In the next, I’m a first-year college student, far from home and struggling to find a social circle where I belong. I would rather avoid the dining hall, where my solitude marks me unusual among the crowded tables of people who have found others like themselves. But it’s the only place where my meals are already paid for, so I don’t have much of a choice. I don’t want to draw attention to myself, so I keep my gaze downward on my daily cup of green tea with lemongrass. 

Skip forward a few more years, and now I’m realizing the chai in my plastic travel cup has gone cold. I’d hoped the caffeine would perk me up after such a restless night — nervousness and excitement had stolen most of the time I should have been sleeping. But I’ve barely had a chance to take a sip from the mug all morning. It’s been a whirlwind of driving to the salon and then the chapel, then putting on my long white dress, and finishing the preparations for the ceremonious transition to the rest of my lifetime, shared with someone else. 

But the shock and stress of the COVID-19 pandemic caused my tea consumption to escalate. For the first time in my life, I was drinking it every day — often twice a day. In the early months of the pandemic, when phrases like “shelter in place,” “new normal,” and “social distancing” were still novel, I started paying attention to how the tea changed me. As the world became saturated with anxiety, the rules of daily life changed at a pace I could barely keep up with. But the mindful practice of making and drinking tea brought me back to a calmer emotional baseline.

Everyone has had to find their anchors to hold for reassurance, and tea is one of mine. We can’t move forward before we have grounded ourselves where we are. We have to settle our feet, take a sip, and find our balance before we take the next step.