This month, I sat down with Ruth Lionberger, a Tokyo resident and tea ceremony practitioner to better understand her journey with tea and how it can serve society.
For Ruth, the most valuable aspect of tea ceremony to modern life is the opportunity to take a break from our hectic schedules, racing minds, and habitual compulsions. Practicing tea invites you to slow down, look inward, and as a result feel calm. The qualities you cultivate through practicing the way of tea flow out and influence your day-to-day life, it becomes an approach, or a way of being. As Ruth says, living a life of tea would mean, “living everyday quiet and unmoved by whatever craziness is surrounding her.”
Since I am not a tea practitioner myself, I think it’s best to hear directly from Ruth as to how she thinks and lives with tea. You can listen to an abbreviated version of our conversation on Soundcloud. We originally chatted for two hours and I could have kept going for many more, this twenty minute segment highlights some of the main points we talked about, hope you enjoy listening!
My Personal Journey with Tea
In his 1906 book, “The Book of Tea,” Okakura Kakuzo worked to explain to an eager, but confused Western audience, what is the practice of tea, where it comes from, and why he values it. As a Westerner who picked that book up over 110 years later, I still felt that same need to understand, to peel back the mystery of the ceremony, and make sense of what it is for, and how it is performed. And as beautiful as his writing is/was, I still didn’t understand tea, it’s only been through hands-on experiences with a few different tea teachers that I think I’m starting to peel back the surface layer and peak into the depths that the practice contains.
One of my first experiences with tea that made me realize there was more to tea than I had given it credit for was at a gathering hosted by my friend, Miho. For Miho, tea is ultimately about sharing imagination, and so before she began her tea ceremony she shared the theme of the event “the winter solstice” and invited us all to imagine how the different elements used during the ceremony: what she was wearing, the tools, the tea, the art on display in the alcove, etc. contributed to our shared moment. It was the first time I was actively interacting in the ceremony instead of just observing and I loved it. Up until that ceremony I had thought of tea as a performance, something I went to watch, not necessarily contribute to. But through Miho’s evocation of our imagination, I realized that the experience was something we were creating together, both host and guest.
The second experience that made me more interested in tea was with Dairik in Kyoto. What I found in Dairik’s tea ceremony was a modern, flexible interpretation of tea ceremony, one that focused on connection and conversation. He still followed some of the traditional procedures when making the tea, but he chatted with us more during the process and also handed the bowl of tea directly to his guests, versus placing it on the tatami mat in front of the guest which is considered more standard. Before Dairik, I had thought of tea ceremony as a “tradition,” almost a dying art form. I hadn’t thought about how relevant tea could be to practitioners today. And while the procedures themselves are thousands of years old, each practitioner is interpreting them differently, reinventing the art and keeping it alive.
Entrance to a tea house at Nezu Museum in Tokyo.
The final experience that sealed my interest in the practice of tea and reverence for the art was with Ruth, at a beautiful tea room in northwestern Tokyo on the grounds of Higo Hosokawa Garden. Ruth asked me to come to the ceremony with a brand new pair of white socks. I’d never been asked to do that in order to attend a ceremony and I was intrigued! Ruth encouraged us to ask questions during the ceremony, taking the time to explain the ‘why’ behind the procedures. My first question was of course, “Why the socks?” Turns out, it was an action to purify ourselves. By changing our socks we were symbolically setting aside who we had been in the world prior to entering the tea room. Our white clean socks were a fresh start not just for our feet but for our souls.
I had known that a host prepares extensively for a tea ceremony. They clean the tea room, clean the utensils, prepare a meal, sift tea, sweep out the garden, among other things (by no means an exhaustive list!). All of these actions are in service of purifying the host’s heart and mind. What I didn’t realize was that guests were also meant to cleanse their hearts and mind before the ceremony. That’s partly why guests walk through the garden before arriving at the tea house for a ceremony, to give them time to slow down, look inward, and detach from their everyday lives. This non-attachment manifests itself through our ability to accept things as they are, rather than wishing them to be a different way. A beautiful example to illustrate the acceptance of things as they are comes from a tea ceremony Ruth recently attended. At some point during the ceremony, when the host was preparing tea, some of the bright, green matcha tea powder accidentally fell onto the glossy black lacquer tea caddy, while technically an “accident” it turned into a beautiful painting that all could admire, like a constellation of stars reflected in a pond at night.
Miho made tea interactive, Dairik made tea modern, and Ruth made tea meaningful.
I still have so much to discover about tea and I’m so grateful to them for sharing the art with me.
If you are interested in experiencing tea Dairik is starting to offer online tea ceremonies. Or, if you are in Tokyo, definitely reach out to Ruth about when she’ll be holding her next tea gathering. I am really hoping to join in person in August.
Sweet to be eaten before tea.
Tea ceremony in Nakagin Capsule.
Tea bowl.