Tao and Tea

• Tea ceremony, cultural relevance or vestigial ostentation? This is in New York where just about everything is bizarre anyway. However, human customs centered around necesities such as sustaining the body and mind, resting, and nourishing at the same time, are a fine idea, especially in frantic paced modern city life. Tea with friends, sharing a ritual can be a bonding experience, perhaps better than the past cocktail martini with a business buddy which has lower astral spinoffs. A tea sharing with friends can be a good time to brainstorm. Rudolf Steiner claimed that tea was the drink for diplomats because it helped create clarity of mind and the formation of words!!! Ritual and/or fanaticism? directory
• Tea and Chinese Wedding Traditions - very interesting and colorful cultural information and links. Compares traditional customs with today's life ways.



• Republic of Tea, et ilk - merchant, purveyors, packagers. This site has an amusing tea leaves reading by Madame Oolong!
• Organic Tea from India - tour - Bio-dynamic...WOW! Very creditable, good presentation on their bio-dynamic methods with explanations. This is brought to you from the Stash Tea Company, an Oregon venture.
• Tea Digest - cutoms, history and personal perspectives of this most universal of drinks.
• Holy Mountain Tea Company very thorough source of culture, history, religious tradition and, of course, teas.
• Imperial Tea Court
• The Way of Tea - from Sundance Natural Foods, in Eugene, Oregon. This is where I have shopped for years and years. Nice people and many friends there, everything there is good quality. They sell packaged teas and loose teas, but mostly this is a nice site for information.
• Chinese tea stores and merchants: West Coast and Canada (BC), wonderfully pungent places purveying Asian medicinals.
• Tea and medicine: herbs and flowers in the Chinese apothecary and the 'Yellow Emperor's Treatise on Internal Medicine'.This is an old classic but essential to understand contemporary Chinese healing practices. To know which substance to take, it is necessary to understand the basic medical philosophy and theory... which date back to antiquity.
• Pin Yin Index of Chinese Herbs - list form, good instant reference to medicinal substances in the Chinese apothecary.
• Prince Wen Hui's Cook - Chinese dietary therapy. The cook gives the Prince a lesson on the Tao through the metaphor of cutting meat. This is a charming publication, review coming soon. This also requires understanding of Chinese medical theory, if to perscribe a recipe to "take the damp out of the lungs" or "warm up the liver".
• Afternoon Tea - 4 pm Anglo-Europeans and Afternoon Tea, or High Tea, w/corolary of coronary comfort foods…nursery tea. The English in particular have made tea their national mania. The US would have also if it weren't for the Boston Tea Party. In many English households the word tea may mean an evening meal. "Traditional" high formal tea for the leisure classes was four in the afternoon. It is still a nice time to stop for the day and have a "cuppa".
• Tea and British ex-patriates in Australasia - anyone for gumboot tea? The all day brew stews....Lumpenproletariatea!!! In New Zealand they use metal pots they make there that are very flat and round. I have seen teas sitting in these pots cooking all day and as it gets low, a scoop more of tea or water goes in. The idea here is for concentrated caffeine and something warm. Utilitariantea!!. As you can see, tea can be fun.



• links, its endless: