cup of tea

WHCworkshop@yahoogroups.com
	to			WHC Workshop Forum
	date			Aug 30, 2007 10:35 AM
	subject			[WHCworkshop] Re: Guilin and ZEN
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	mailed-by			returns.groups.yahoo.com

> I am
trying
to
in-
corpor-
ate
zen
into
some
of
my haiku. Perhaps I am unclear > on what zen really is but I know I am trying to achieve it in my personal life. > In this haiku the person has achieved zen by the " finding space in an empty cup." ....................... Here is a bit on Zen and Haiku http://haikuandhappiness.blogspot.com/2007/01/zen-and-haiku.html Oh dear, you choose a difficult subject.

Re: [WHCworkshop] Re: Guilin and tea

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Isa Kocher <786isa@gmail.com>	Thu, Aug 30, 2007 at 3:28 PM
To: WHCworkshop@yahoogroups.com
after a week of sitting at Greystone in Riverdale in the Bronx, we stopped and had some tea together before going our various ways. I am a tea addict but for some reason I didn't have my tea cup. A friend of mine gave me hers, and as I drank the tea, the cup which was quite old and whose old cracked glaze showed the traces of many years of tea drinking, became for me the most beautiful tea cup I had ever seen. I see it now. A commercial tea cup with tiny blue generic flowers, and thin stems with leaves like tea leaves, a solid old used tea cup. I loved that tea cup so much and still do. I really haven't a clue why that cup. I never loved one thing so much. [exclusive of the set of solingen steel kitchen knives I bought with my first pay check as a grad student in 1970, which cost a couple of hundred dollars then and still are at work in my kitchen] I used that cup for years after wards until it found itself another home. Nothing lasts. Everything has its place and time and purpose. Pope John XXIII was asked by an architect who became his friend in the last year of his life, "Aren't you concerned that you are dying before your work here is done?" The pope died before Vatican II was finished and he had spent his last year being a go between between the radical right curia and the wild eyed liberals of academic Catholicism (one of whom then is now the current chair). Pope John answered his friend, "Any day is a good to be born. Any day is a good day to die." after sitting the pure taste of tea cracked old teacup