Cha An

Cha An was the perfect place to end my day with Noguchi. A Japanese tea house found at the end of a long wooden staircase to the second floor, Cha An is one of my favorite spots in NYC. A bowl of Uji Kabesecha here, with postcards from the Noguchi museum.

The other day I practiced Japanese Tea Ceremony with my friend Tara. We couldn't remember how long it had been since we last practiced. A year? Years? Tara told me that when she cleaned the cobwebs and dirt from the tea house, it felt like she'd abandoned an old friend. "How do these things happen?" we asked, knowing how they did, but still wondering how they do.

As I held the tea bowl in my hands to turn it three and a half times around, I felt red maple leaves fall in Kyoto, I felt anatomy prerequisites and the question, "Should I be an OT or a PT?" I lifted the chashaku and felt the winding roads on Oki Island, the drive down I-25 from Santa Fe, my OT school graduation. Folding the fukusa I met Haruko, my tea ceremony teacher, for the first time, and then I felt when she moved away.

The movements in tea ceremony have remained the same for centuries. When I moved my hands in those particular ways again, images from all the other times I'd moved my hands in those ways flowed forth. The body holds images, memories and beliefs in its tissues. I was experiencing an unraveling of muscle memory.

While I had come and gone and returned again, the tea, and its ceremony, had remained. Seasons and relationships and jobs had changed, but the tea remained. The route from which I arrived to the tea bowl had changed and changed and changed, but the tea, all along, had remained.

"The cult of tea is founded on the adoration of beautiful things among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It is essentially a worship of the imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life."

-Kakuzo Okakura