There is a certain peace of mind that comes with drinking a freshly steeped cup of tea. Today at the Art of Tea we had 4 potential wholesale customers visiting our warehouse and enjoying tea together. By chance, two were of Arabic descent and the other two were from Israel. All four found a sense of peace and a deep sense of joy and camaraderie in sharing tea together. The common thread was how they all looked back at tea as a part of a their childhood experience, saying that “it was always around” and “I remember my grandparents making me tea” and “It is part of our culture.”
One person on each side shared a common way of leaving a bit of tea in their cup as to not let the taste or sense to come to an end. To them an empty tea cup was likened to an ending. While the other two agreed that not finishing their tea was disrespectful and the liquid contents in the cup must be consumed in its entirety.
It was agreed that tea is the gap between nations, religions, genders and cultures. We can learn alot from the slowing process of sitting and allowing the tea to take in its positive effects on our state of mind and body and reveal our own sense of humanity and intelligence as stated so poetically “Two Kinds of Intelligence” in the book Essential Rumi

Two Kinds of Intelligence

There are two kinds of intelligence: One acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from outside to inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.

Version by Coleman Barks
“Essential Rumi”
HarperSanFrancisco, 1995