teakkurim

6 tammuz, 5782 over the past 4 months, my life has been consumed by work and school. it felt like all i was doing was working, reading research articles, and going to classes. thankfully, that is no longer my life. to my exuberant surprise, i dont have school during the summer, yay!!! this means i am going to try and do as much camping as i can. i still have work to think about, but that is manageable. with some normalcy returning to my life, i am trying to rebuild the habits of doing what make me happy. one of those things is writing (and not just blog writing). another of those things is praying which, like exercising, is z hard habit to pick back up after tucking it into the part of my mind labelled "things i will do when im not doing school and work at the same time anymore." speaking of exercise as a metaphor, i am rebuilding my habit of going to the gym. i still did it during classes but not as often as i liked. time to get buff... as if. even as i write this post, this...

16 adar II 5782 i am excited that my relationship to qi continues to evolve ( past posts on qi ). just with any practice or activity, the more i relate to chaqi, the more i gain. this does not hold to the isolated activity of ‘gong fu cha.’ the more we experience life, the more we can relate the world we are encountering and it’s generative lessons to any practice and vice versa. the more i consciously interact with chaqi, the more i learn to interact with qi in my other encounters. qi is not a one way street. yes, a tea has qi, but we as the tea drinkers can change how the qi interacts with us. one aspect of this is the classic example of how your mood can alter your experience. if i am having a grumpy day and feeling rushed and stressed out, i may interpret the tea as ‘energizing.’ but if i am calm, relaxed, and intentional when drinking my tea, i might feel the tea as more calming and not energizing at all. but here’s where the kicker comes in ‘hey, teakkurim, if one’s mood is what ...

5 adar 1 5782 i am starting to settle into my tea habits. i have gained a good sense of what i want to drink and when. ive also started to gain a sense of how i want my tea budget to look. both of these things are a couple of the main goals for me on this blog. i now know that too much sheng is rough on my stomach. this is especially true for younger shengs. i don’t want sheng to be a daily drinker for me (maybe an aged huangpian or something decent and affordable and aged that works well for cow drinking. when i first started my puer journey i was hoping to ride the wave of the shouletariate and to have shou be my go to daily drinker while saving my budget for more fancy teas to be reserved for the better quality aged sheng. this hope was momentarily derailed by an experience with a fancy shou wrecking my stomach. but after drinking a lot of tea, and then drinking some more tea, i am back on the road to settling into that goal and being happy with it. i will write a future post about ...

  3 kislev 5782 its finally happening. i am writing a post about weed and tea. it’s been a long time coming. ive wanted to write this so long ago but i thought i should have some more ‘respectable’ content on this blog first. it’s the same idea as when you don’t show your true self until the 3rd date date but that is not my style. either you like me now or you don’t. this is what youre gonna get so get used to it. let's get that out of the way quick. there is a lot to talk about regarding this topic and this will probably be the first of multiple posts. the first thing i want to start off with hearkens back to my previous posts . tea is a plant. it has a lot of noticeable affects on our bodies including immediate ones and ones we don’t see right off the bat (ie: naturally occurring vitamins and minerals etc. those phytochemicals affect our blood sugar or glucose levels or other scientific things i don’t understand and produce different reactions or sensations in our bodies). th...

28 cheshvan 5782 i am happy to say i still have plenty to write about for this blog. this includes a backlog of posts ive written that i keep saved on a word document on my laptop. i don’t live with wifi (by choice. yeah… im one of those). after i write something i have to be motivated and in the mood to use my internet time to post it to this blog. in addition to the languishing collection of posts adrift in the word document is a collection of tea notes that i write on scraps of paper and in a composition notebook that i keep next to me as i drink. and yes, i keep the notes in a journal so i can keep my tea time free of screens. its like my blog is caught up in some dysfunctional and inefficient bureaucracy of tea publishing. first, notebook, then word document, then send it to the presses once wifi is within reach and the article has been proof read enough, more or less, and then ‘click.’ still to come in the future is me talking about me beginning my journey into searching for th...

10 cheshvan 5782   since i mentioned it in my last post, i thought i would talk about the naked yiwu from teas we like. this is a well liked and well known tea in the western puer scene. it is made by a Taiwanese boutique brand called Xi Zi Hao (XZH) and it was my first Taiwanese boutique tea. like the love forever, i am not going to have any hot takes or new insights on this tea. off the bat i will say it is a very good tea but for $168/cake plus shipping, i am a touch let down. my one problem with it is that i don’t get many steeps out of it and i wish it had more stamina. i made this point on discord and some people also feel this way, but, the rumor is that the cake is blended rather unevenly and there are some real great spots and some just okay spots. i am still waiting to hit that sweet magic spot. one reason this tea is particularly liked is because the price is a good deal for something coming from XZH. their teas can be quite expensive. one reason it is more afforda...

13 av 5781 i just had a big tea tasting with a friend for my first time. in the past i have poured tea for friends many times, but this time, we drank four teas. damnnnnnnn. they’ve had fancy tea before but not often and it was a while ago. they usually drink green tea. they like to needle me for being one of those tea snobs who doesn’t drink green tea, which i am (i just never happen to crave it. im also currently in a puer wormhole). i had a whole thing planned out. first, try this fancy green tea i traded for from a friend the other day. then, we would try a young sheng puer blend so we could compare green to puer. next was some 2019 autumn gushu. here we were really able to notice the difference in qi between all the teas. i intended to have our last to be a young spring gushu, but i asked if they wanted another young puer or something different like an aged puer. she wanted something different so i brewed us some 2011 yiwu stored in Taiwan. very different, very nice, l...