Tea Revisited

Looking at this hot mug of lemon tea, I think this is where it’s at. Your head can be such a disarray of scrambled noise that often you forget to actually pay attention to anything that is present. Yet when the smells start turning on the olfactory sensors, when the eyes are bewildered by vapour that creases the air like it were silk, it’s then I remember that I am a sentient being, and that I am feeling. And that I am reflecting. Or more so am able to reflect. What do I know about this tea? I know water-mediated existence is watching water change states of existence. I know that every whisper of steam reflects a million molecules’ energised attempt to escape the cauldron. And transfixed further, the heat and the swirling does not today take me through my own memories, but back through the minds of man at different times. While I know the pensive mind has always revelled in such simple stupor, I can’t help but be perplexed by how differently we will have interpreted the phenomena. Steam; an escaping soul to the old animist, an act of god to the ancient Greek, an illusion constructed by the visual cortex in response to fragmented light reflections, to the 21st century man of learning. And these are not just different explanations, but represent completely different feelings, completely different perceptions, completely different consciousnesses, as varied from one another as successive generations are to each other. The result is a reality so malleable, as to be as ever-changing as the water, which turns from tea to body, and from breath to air.