Steepings: My mountain mecca

I love a place for how deeply I feel connected to everything that makes it. No surprise, a tea garden has homed me in for life.

“I just know this place,” I exclaimed.

As we sat overlooking a patch of tea garden to the thin zig-zag of a small town, now glowing in buttery yellows of its own light, iridescent under the night’s full moon, I felt boggled by how much this was true. I really did know this place. Not just in the way where you learn about something by spending a lot of time with it but in a way that’s more…intimate. The kind you know deep in your guts, not just the brain. Through tactic knowledge and also scents, sounds, and sensations. You become viscerally connected to everything, including the energy of everything, and this is possibly the most affecting, most grounding thing you’ll ever know.

I sat here, in the exact same spot, many years ago, back when I was visiting the tea garden for work. I’d snuck away from our group and wanting to walk a bit I started trailing down a narrow, winding road that started at the end of the house where we were put up. I’d barely walked a few steps when I stopped short at the curvy bent of the road that overlooked the long stretch of a mountainside, rising not just rippling, to the back and a steep drop right in the front that leaped off a manicured garden patch. It was a brilliant view then. It was a brilliant view now. Only this time I was sharing it with someone.

Connection is the truest test of whether or not I enjoy the place of my travels. The more I find myself sitting with the impulse to settle, the more the place matters. It’s an instinct borne of smells, sensations, and feelings, not so much thinking. In this case, my connection with this tea garden happened as I caught a whiff of eucalyptus on my way to the garden the first time around. Crisp, clean, and fresh, the scent hung in the air along the winding path that led up to the garden. The mist that day carried smells of forest greens and wet earth, and tailing along comes this fresh, steady attack of eucalyptus that cut through it all. My senses were arrested and permanently impressed with the scent — a favorite now. After that, the garden charmed me in other ways.

Inside, I found myself cheered by the soft honeyed sweetness of amaryllis — a flower I had only known (and loved) for what it stands for; a steady determination, in case you were wondering. Laced with thick geraniums, roses, and chrysanthemums, the foyer was an idyllic scented sanctuary as can be. The mountain ridge towered tall and stretched far, flanked by manicured tea gardens and rowdy forest patches, and this ensured a dreamy setting marked by thin mist and cold air. The kind of cold that feels not icy to the nose but exists more tenderly and envelops you in sensations that seem to settle your stresses and ease you into a sweet slumber. You can’t hear much, and this feels eerie in no way. The silence is easy to bear because your senses are caught and caressed by lush sights, sweet scents, and cold misty air. Perfect for some solitary soul-searching.

I have been to this tea garden twice since. I have driven through the scents of eucalyptus and sat on the porch laced with amaryllis, roses, and geraniums. I have sat facing the tall gingerly tree that stands right in front of the house, and the swing that’s placed right under it. I have sat in on this big view by the curvy bent of the road for many many silent minutes. But never with someone. Never with someone who might ask me why all this means as much.

I tell them there are very few things in my life I know as deeply as tea. I know it academically, professionally, and leisurely. I have sat with it for thousands of hours over the last decade and while there is so much that I know now, tea always delights me with more. There’s always something more. There is always room for new possibilities. Possibilities that stand not at odds but connect with everything that has come before it. I have always felt there’s room for someone like me here. In this wide expanse that is at once clean and messy, tall and small, even and jagged, I feel like my whole self can belong. In the 34 years of my existence, nothing has made me feel this way as much.

For many years I felt suffocated in my skin and head. I have pretended my way through life and done a good enough job of coming across as carefree and joyous. All the while knowing and feeling with clawing certainty that there are no takers for this person that I am. None who’d take this messy, distracted, average intellect girl in their loving folds. I live in the perpetual shadow of my anxieties and feel responsible for them. So I’d rather morph into my surroundings than be my messy, average self. I’d rather be a reflection of all the good, desirable things in this world than be who I am.

Learning how tea, at once, mirrors the place where it casts its roots — including the soil, the air, and the people who tend to it — and expresses qualities that it chooses to cultivate has been liberating. A tea is never the same twice — every season it smells a little different, tastes a little different. In a way, it exercises free will while harboring expectations. And this is the very thing I delight in. When I see tea, I see everything that it is now, all that it has been, and all that it can be. It’s at once the same and different. True to her conditions, yet true to herself. And she can be loved and feel free. Tea is an act of love. Her own included. And knowledge like this has a way of settling into your skin and bones. The kind that relieves and liberates.

That evening, in my mountain mecca, I was reminded of all this. And it was welcomed and held in someone’s loving folds.