Licorice & Sloe Company

Taking time for tea

By Bil Silliker | November 24, 2005

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last five years you’ve certainly heard or read something about the health benefits of green tea. It seems as though this wonder herb can prevent or curtail the symptoms of just about any sickness or disease known to man.

So What! Who cares? Are we really drinking green tea because it’s good for us? We should be drinking green tea because we love it… because it tastes good… because it evokes something spiritual within us or perhaps because it brings us back to some pleasant memory of rolling in grassy fields or walking along the ocean shore. Drinking tea, green as well as others, should help us escape from the moment prior to taking that first sip into the moments of peace that follow with each new sip.

Throughout the world tea is consumed in some form of ceremony. In the United States we drink tea because the media or our doctors have suggested that we should. What kind of ceremony is that?

Ceremony doesn’t have to include 14 specific utensils and 127 steps in exact sequence in order to be a ceremony. Some of my favorite customers are the groups of elderly women who find time in their day for tea. They don’t think about drinking tea ceremoniously. They drink it matter of factly as they sit back and relax and gossip, discuss upcoming events, days gone by or recent losses. They take time for tea. Taking time for tea is the ceremony and you can define for yourself what that time is about.

That quiet photographer sits and drinks his Lapsang Souchong alone, sometimes with a book, sometimes with his computer, other times with just his thoughts. The real estate divas come in for a pot of Snow Dragon and share a sandwich. The local mom/writer has her Tea A La Marrakech daily, sometimes to go and sometimes while relaxing in the tea lounge with a book. That couple in the window holding hands drink Pu-Erh and gaze into each others eyes, while the couple in back are drinking their Matcha Lattes and reading the Sunday paper. Those teenage girls drink their Lychee Black and Bubble Teas while giggling about school and boys.

It’s their teatime, it’s their ceremony, and none of them appear to be hung up on the good health of the beverage they’re drinking… but they’re all enjoying the moments in which they are drinking their tea.

Don’t limit your drinking habits based on health alone. If you don’t enjoy drinking green tea, then drink a tea that you do enjoy. They’re all good for you… not just the green teas… so lets stop drinking green tea for it’s health benefits and start drinking the teas we love to drink and lets drink them ceremoniously.