In a bowl of jade-green silence,
steam curls like prayer,
and the world pauses.
No temple bell, no sermon—
only the water, whispering.

From a leaf steeped in silence,
a pilgrim found gentleness.
Medicine became poetry,
poetry became peace.

Once a leaf, bitter and healing,
found its way to the lips of pilgrims, searching
they drank, and the mind became still.
The cup was small,
but it held stillness,
the stillness of worlds within.

Within the tea-room’s wooden hush,
A cup passes between hands—
A flower leans toward its own shadow,
a brushstroke fades to nothing—
and in that nothing, the sound of rain
That helped create the clay.

Through centuries of solitude,
men built their empires of porcelain and sorrow.
But here, within the clay rim,
the universe beckons.

Between two hands.
The cracked cup holds warmth
because it is not whole.
In shared imperfection
we find our wholeness.

To live as water lives—
simple, transparent, complete—
is to taste the philosophy of tea:
to honor the imperfect,
to love the passing moment,
Tea binds heaven to earth,
and to the quiet arts of being.

. . .

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism—Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. 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.
- The first paragraph of the first chapter of "The Book of Tea" by Okakura Kakuzō (1862-1913) published in 1906.

I’ve begun work on a series of journals. One half of each two-page spread will be reserved for the writer’s own notes, the other a painting, poem and journal reflection. Work has begun on a series of poems that offer my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching which will be offered as a journal. Another, this one to be published later next year, will be based on The Book of Tea. The idea is to combine the mysterious beauty of these ancient poems with journaling as a practice that can provide insight into the hidden but profound patterns that underly each of our lives.

The Book of Tea has long been a source of inspiration for artists and writers. It has, for instance, been cited as an important influence on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Arthur Wesley Dow, and Georgia O'Keeffe.

In 1927, Heidegger published a book entitled Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). It made him famous. Heidegger's concept of Dasein in Sein und Zeit was inspired – although Heidegger remained silent on this – by Okakura Kakuzō's concept of das-in-der-Welt-sein (being-in-the-worldness) expressed in The Book of Tea to describe Zhuangzi's philosophy.

Above, my poem inspired by the first chapter of The Book of Tea. You can read the entire chapter in its original form on the Heron Dance website here.