Vanilla Green and Change

A friend of mine send me a sampler of tea from the company Adagio Teas. The blends range from the traditional to the adventurous, with many possessing suggestive names like Sencha Overture. The quality of each tea varies, perhaps according to my tastes or what actually is. The Gun Powder, for instance, looks like juicy caviar, but it brews up a little darker than what I usually prefer in Gun Powder. The Bi Luo Chun is typical. It's very hard to get a superior picking outside China. Bi Luo Chun was one of the varieties I had "on account" at a very pleasant tea house in the Xi Dan district of Beijing back in the day. I'm particularly persnickety about this variety.

As the creative imperative of our modern time often takes expression by viewing the ancient in contexts that reflect the here and now, tea has similarly "modernized". For instance, the traditional Orange Pekoe is transmogrified into Green Pekoe. Sencha, the crystal clean green favored among Japanese, becomes Sencha Overture, though discerning what the overture is is neither apparent to my taste buds nor to my inner-marketing-self. You see, on some level I feel like "why add legs to the snake?", a Chinese aphorism that essentially means to leave well enough alone.

Isn't Sencha just fine without such overtures? It's gotten by for a good millennium without overtures and now they're necessary?... which brings me to the matter of Vanilla Green. The very idea of it struck me as cacophonous. Vanilla is Barry White smooth, best when mixed with the mellow tones of good black tea. I can even see red tea as being a good match, but not green, which is chlorophyll clean, dancing to the innocuous notes of nothingness, below the high tones of citrus.

I was guilty, resistant on purely ideological grounds to the commingling of vanilla and green teas. It got me to wondering about just how much of a traditionalist I am and how receptive to change I am. Sure, change sounds nice, but how do we react with the changes we don't anticipate? In retrospect, I can say that I didn't expect to like Vanilla Green, and my first-day's encounter proved right. I got to thinking more abstractly about vanilla in the green movement, perhaps in the Chocolate Rain vein but more with respect to change.

There are many of us who, out of the necessities of human induced climate change (HICC), belief in dramatic down scaling in lifestyle. Still some of us believe, as a result of the very same purported necessities, that shifting to new technologies, such as electric automobiles, will allow us to have a vanilla greening of sorts, making room for greater consumptive capacity. Neither camp seems to have made any allowances for the possibility that the earth's changes may be independent of human behavior, and those that have raised such questions seem so set on debunking the theology of HICC, that people concerned for the responsible extraction, production, and consumption of natural resources have skeptically concluded that these apostates are simply in the pocket of some of the earth's chief culprits.

I must admit to being pretty skeptical of any broad appeal: Darfur, breast cancer, the Dallas Cowboys. What has most disappointed me about the green discussion has been what has appeared to be an abandonment of some of its very own interesting principles. The Gaia Hypothesis, for example, maintains that the earth is a sentient being, self-regulating, much as the human body is. I have read very interesting articles about the earth's underwater volcanoes, natural shifts in the earth's poles, and have personally considered the imponderable effects of deforestation in Brazil, Congo, Borneo, and Sumatra. What kind of equilibrium does the earth seek as a result of and independent from human behavior? How about the earth's equilibrium vis-a-vis the sun? Is the earth's equilibrium consistent with human equilibrium? We know well that humans can affect the earth's equilibrium at least on the level of an ecosystem. For example, deforestation has turned once-tropical parts of the Philippines into desert. But I've never heard any discussion on the possible ways in which the earth may seek balance from such conditions. How much does the drought in the Southeast have to do with blasting of mountain tops in West Virginia?

Back when they introduced the railroads to China, there were many local traditionalists who howled that the laying of tracks would cause irreparable damage to the earth's qi. Just recently, I heard a story that the ancient continent from which the Atlantians descended sank after the tapping of geo-thermals. We can chalk this type of thinking up to superstition (We need to note, however, that even Plato made reference to Atlantis) or we just might begin to consider the presence of earthly qi and our effect on it. Is deforesting the earth for more copper and cadmium to put in electric cars really going to make this situation better? Don't get me wrong; I'm in favor of fresh air, but is air pollution as much a culprit of HICC as, say, the hundreds of thousands of miles of concrete and asphalt, which magnify and collect heat from the sun? I placed the Vanilla Green on the shelf, satisfying myself with the mysterious overtures of Sencha and quizzical implications of Green Pekoe till they were exhausted.

Here's where a side discussion on aesthetics, the fusion of form and function, becomes necessary. Tea must be brewed and drunk from the proper vessel according to its type. Black tea drunk from tiny porcelain cups meant for green tea just won't do. Many will complain about an unpleasant bitterness of green tea after having brewed it in a teapot not altogether dissimilar from the pot that Auntie Agatha enjoyed her sassafras in. Like drinking wine from a tumbler, to do so masks the layered subtleties of the leaf's personality. It's like the Chinese landscape painting that distinguishes between shades of gray. Drinking high-quality leaves, brewed at proper temperature, from small white cups affords one the opportunity to appreciate subtlety. Of course, not all tea is to be drunk in this manner. It was clear that I had failed to discern, or stated differently, had only begun to discover which vessel most properly accommodated that which formed as a co-function of vanilla and green.

I have two Mao teacups, the mug type. Chairman Mao had a real thing for tea, so much so that it is said that his teeth were usually caked with a blackened paste of tea, which he used instead of brushing. One cup has a kitschy Andy Warhol-like image of Mao as a youthful revolutionary. It's bona fide artsy because it comes from the artsy company turned luxury brand Shanghai Tang. The other is a 100th birthday anniversary cup from Mao's hometown. I like this cup a lot. It's pale green on the outside, with a crude " arte volken" feel. It is pure white inside, reflecting the trueness of the liquor. Vanilla green possessed a beautiful jade quality. The sides of the cup formed a pool in which vanilla's aroma could pool, a kind of Barry White meets Zatoichi in all the right ways.

It only took the changing of the vessel for me to get my head around Vanilla Green. In what conceptual vessel do we hold the earth at present? More important, in what ways must it change to accommodate the genuine form and function of earth in all its layered subtleties?