Tea thoughts from Nepal
The clue to the reason for this may be because I’m writing this in Nepal.
I come out to this country each year to work with schools in the hill regions and one of the most remote I’ve visited lately has a tea plantation, about three hectares of bushes which have just, after seven years, become ready for plucking.
But that’s where the problem has started. They have no idea what to do with the tea leaves once they’ve plucked them.
On their behalf I visited a tea expert in Kathmandu yesterday and I learnt a few things about tea:
1.You only pick the top bud and first leaf - all the rest of the chest-high plant is not needed.
2.It’s not the leaf that matters, it’s what you do to it afterwards. " It’s like artistry", said my new knowledgeable friend, "each production is different."
3.It’s important not to dry or process the tea near other strong smells, as these waft into the flavour and can spoil it.
4.The tea leaves from the school’s plants had been overcooked and tasted acrid. But you only saw that they were burnt after you had brewed the tea and looked at the leaves at the bottom of the cup.
5.My expert friend brewed me some locally grown green tea: it had no colour but tasted good. He compared this with some Chinese tea which was much greener. "Ah, that’s because they use fertiliser to make the colour." The Nepali tea is organic and therefore the leaf looks greyer.
I learned a lot more, but some of these points are quite interesting for our own lives:
1.Although only the top leaves are used, the rest of the leaves are equally important to produce the nutrients which those leaves need. Some folk are more obviously talented, but we are all equally important and useful.
2.It’s not what you were born with that matters, it’s what we do afterwards, what we do with our lives. How we progress is artistry and each one is different
3.Be careful not to spend time with those who might affect negatively how we develop. Otherwise some of their influence may ‘waft’ onto us.
4.The good or bad in people is not always obvious on first meeting. It’s only after seeing their actions and over time that we get to appreciate them, or not.
5.And finally, artificial things can make us seem brighter and more colourful - the clothes we wear, the car we drive, the way we spend our money - but if we are grounded in good ‘organic’ soil, in the things that really matter, it will show in the way we live our lives and through our friendships with others.
In the Bible Jesus tells us to be "the salt of the earth" (Matthew 5:13) - to add good flavour to the lives of those around us.
Are we rooted in good organic matter, or in artificial fertiliser?
