Four a.m. cup of tea.
Mar 29, 2008 Personal
As I am growing older, more insane and sprouting chin hairs long enough to let children swing like monkeys from them, I realize that I have well and truly screwed up my sleeping schedule.
I think it’s my brain. The brain that keeps me up until noon the next day writing silly blog entries about cat snot and my husband’s gas, the brain that tells me it’d be awesome to do a comic about my life with cats then reminds me that it’s a lot of work. And yes, the same brain that likes pink, shiny things and decorates her desk with Christmas L.E.D lights all year around while plastering Disney stickers from one end of it to the other. (Gosh, I just don’t know why I never sleep!)
I have some good nights and some bad nights. The L.E.D lights around my desk come in red, orange, blue and green. They’re cherry sized spheres scoured in little triangles to soften and throw the colored lights out in a bit of a glow. They fall against my desk and make miniature rainbows in the pink mardi-gras beads I have hanging from my upper shelf for no reason other than they are pink. And shiny.
Everything in the house is sleeping. My husband is snoring away, reminding me of the tide crashing along the shore and smashing boats into little pieces while passengers scream and are broken against the rocks. The cats aren’t chewing on my feet, hands, head or trying to get me to feed them by sitting on my face. The fan in my computer is a low whirr which moves air at a pace I imagine stately southern women fan their faces in the height of summer. There is no creaking of feet against the pre-fab wooden floor, no dog barking because some one a mile away sneezed—its stillness, in its noisiest, calmest form.
On good nights, it’s comforting. Despite the loud silence, it’s the living sort of silence which reminds me that the world’s just taking a nap as my brain zips along at crack snorter’s speed.
On bad nights, it can be a lonely sound, making me wish for the song of the birds at five am and all the horrendous caterwauling of everyday that means this house is awake.
On either of these nights, good or bad, as long as it is sleepless I tend to like to sit down at my desk and have myself four a.m. tea. Green tea, to be precise, of whichever variety I wish to try at the moment (though Gen mai cha, white monkey, chocolate and citron green (a unique flavor from Adagio) are my favorites at the moment) and go through a little ritual.
Source: WikipediaI use loose leaf teas because they smell like healthy, nature, wild leaves and some times like the tea my grandmother and parents drank. When it’s brewing, depending on the type, the leaves like to unfurl just as I’ve watched my cats stretch in the middle of sun naps, languid and slow. There are more colors than just green too, occasionally I can see red, brown, yellow and orange, spices as well as bits of stem too. For the three minutes or so it’s brewing, I turn into an idiot kid and shove my nose right over it. My glasses fog immediately so I can’t see anything but my mouth as well as my nose is filled with this wonderful, steam-scent of brewing tea. It builds anticipation and it builds a memory for me to hold onto until the next cup.
Drinking it is when I can just stop—read maybe, be slovenly, take my time through my own thoughts when I’d usually be zigzagging at a million miles an hour.
It makes the screwed up sleeping schedule not so very important. Or the thoughts. Or the worries about bills, or the silence, or the laundry which I need to do, or the floor that needs to be swept, or what I said seven years ago –oh my god I was such a dork—all of that floats away for a time.
It amazes me how utterly simplistically complicated creatures we are as human beings. That a ritual of tea, or coffee, or a moment even though sleepless, can leave us feeling so very much as peace and give us a few moments to remember how easy it is to grab a chunk of joy to keep for ourselves.
Life can sure do it’s best to keep the blinders on us, trying to fool us into thinking there’s nothing but despair, sorrow, and that attaining happiness is a long drawn out, expensive nearly impossible affair involving pills in addition to therapists. We can so easily forget to just stop and be.
What is your four a.m cup of tea? What is it that you like to do to just shed the stress, calm the mind and find some happiness for yourself?
