Daily Nourishment for August 4, 2024: Literary Tea
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 30 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 15 minutes
“Direct your heart upward.”
Pause.
If you can, prepare a cup of hot tea with mindfulness. Give attention to how your senses are stirred during each step. While waiting for it to steep, take some deep breaths with a six-count inhale and a six-count exhale.
Or, skip the tea and take a few deep breaths.
Prompt.
Read this excerpt from a piece about literary tea in The New Yorker:
Tea is everywhere in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which is an ode to inaction and paralysis. Just how does one broach the subject of love at afternoon tea? Planning out the right words takes time:
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
Inevitably, in the course of all that fretting, our hero begins to lose his nerve:
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
In the end, of course, he says nothing; this is a poem about self-doubt and aching regret—two conditions, perhaps, that even a soothing cup of tea cannot cure.
Practice.
Set a timer for seven minutes and respond to the Pause and Prompt above and/or write everything you know about tea. Personal experiences, literary references, facts you’ve picked up along the way.
If you like, begin writing a new tea-themed poem, essay, story, or letter to a friend.
Want More?
Read the entire 2010 piece in The New Yorker.
Read chapter 13 in The Great Belonging: How Loneliness Leads Us to Each Other about how warm beverages and other warm things help us feel less lonely.
Tell me your favorite teas in the comments or over on this Threads post. Yay, tea.
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Upcoming Workshops & Gatherings
—The August Co-Writing Schedule is live.
—Spiritual Direction for Writers® + Enneagram for Creativity Gathering will take place on Saturday, September 28th. Recordings will be available if you can’t join us live. Pre-Sale registration live through Monday.
August 31— Online Revision Stations Designed by Lauren F. Winner
Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Charlotte Donlon.
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