world · Day 153 · Week 22
The Tea Cloth
Inside you, the same small motions are being practised over and over — and tonight a tea master shows that this is how a whole life is made.
He had folded the cloth a thousand times. He folded it now as if for the first.
In an old wooden house in the city of Kyoto, in a room no larger than a small boat, there lived a tea master named Sen. He had learned tea from his father, who had learned from his father, who had learned from a teacher whose name had been forgotten because he had never written it down.
The room had four mats on the floor. It had a low door that grown men had to bow to enter. It had a single shelf with a single bowl. It had a small fire pit cut into the floor where water heated in an iron kettle that was older than anyone in the city. In the corner, folded neatly, lay a white cloth — the cloth used to wipe the bowl, the scoop, the rim of the kettle.