A quiet passion

Extracts from a filmed interview in which Bruce Ginsberg talks about the beliefs and passions that fuel his love affair with tea.

“I want to talk to you about the idea of ‘slow’ tea. It is inspired by the way that traditional connoisseurs in China viewed tea and tea drinking. Tea has been part of Chinese culture since before the birth of Christ. What interests me particularly is the aspects of tea-drinking in China that relate to relaxation and Nature.

To understand how the Chinese think about tea we have to understand something of their cosmology. They believe that we are all part of a vast moving landscape in which Nature and our own nature is identical. The human body is seen as an individual cosmos of moving energies that interacts with other cosmoses outside it. This is very much in tune with modern Western thinking on ecology. What we do affects the world around us. What we eat and drink from that world affects us. If we have corrupted the world in some way then what we receive from it will also be corrupt. We are what we eat and drink. Therefore our approach to how we eat and drink is of great importance for our own well-being.

From the earliest days, tea drinking in China was associated with people doing meditation. Tea was grown around the monasteries in the high mountains and was served through the long hours of meditation as an elixir to help maintain the ideal state of mind - a sense of awareness and alertness combined with a feeling of deep and peaceful harmony.

In Eastern cultures the qualities of tea and tea drinking came to be symbolic of the state of being part of a greater whole. It was a ‘gateway’ to a sense of enlightened awareness. It became more and more ritualised culminating in the famous ‘tea ceremony’. While most modern-day versions of the ceremony lack the spirituality and sense of inner calm, at its best it can still play a key role in bringing a participant to a deeper state of consciousness.

Let me take you on a ‘virtual’ visit to an early tea house and garden so you can understand the experience and hopefully begin to see why ‘slow is beautiful’.