I’ve prepared my Bai Mu Dan white tea for hundreds of people over the years, but my most recent preparation uncovered a significant trail for my mind to wander down.
Recent guests at Carino started a conversation with me about how I described this tea to them, and how it reminded them of a movie ‘After Yang’ which at the time I hadn’t seen. I made the guests a promise to watch it and discuss it with them during their next visit. I watched the movie the following night, I cried, it was a moving film, I can’t recommend it enough. I can relate to it and the main character so well.
The following day I had made a sale on this site, a teacup and wall scroll set called ‘Winter Rhyme’. The scroll was in a prominent position in my shop Linvers Atelier for the entire year I had it open, I gazed at it often. When I closed the shop up, I listed a few items I had in there for sale on this site. I never expect what I put in this shop to sell, and I’m often both a mixture of happy and sad when they do. As I was packing up the scroll I had an epiphany – Am I in the minority of people who can create sets like this?
I can’t recall when it started, when my brain allowed me to creatively observe and describe aromas and flavors. I must have been somewhere around 22 years old. I had a lot of influence from a dear friend Al Drinkle, listening to him and the people around him joke about and describe wine. ‘This smells like an apple ______’s mom put in her ass’ and things of that nature. As I stood quietly on the edge of the tasting circle, smelling the wines and considering just which aromas inside that they might be labelling as these ass odors. Surely these were the formative days for me.
Over the years I’ve had teas that tasted of asteroids wiping out oceans, being ambushed by alligators in a tranquil bayou, wandering Aztec pyramids with gold lined walls and flamingos carrying croissants. Warm chinook sunsets, hot mountainsides in July, and perhaps even hot mountainsides in October. Sometimes teas remind me of dishes, sometimes clothing styles, sometimes music. There seems to be in me, some observational capacity that is unusually active and more importantly — ‘agreeable’ by others. As I drift through life, I’ll see things like paintings, or YouTube videos that are ‘exactly what I thought of when I had X tea’. For paintings I’ll buy a print of them and create a set that I’ll display in my house or somewhere that can bring me joy. It’s so cool for me to show these to people and get a reaction that reinforces my beliefs.
Why do I think I’m in some kind of minority that can do this? Precisely because these sets are the only things on this site that seem to sell. It’s very mysterious to me. I don’t go out of my way to make sets, and I won’t get in the mindset of designing them on purpose. That being said, there is one more I’m going to release soon called the Ballet of October.
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