Leaflet no. 12
This week’s leaflet tea tastes like … saltwater brine, lavender & mint, crocodile tears, an evening cappuccino, live guitar through a laptop speaker
Hello, everyone.
Tea Leaf Tech is a process in which I brew a cup of the Beobab.tree’s blend (its bark, leaves, its fruit, and a dapple of honey—of course!), which is a way to introduce settling and warmth into the day’s spiral of events. During this time of sipping and slowness, ideas and images collect at the bottom of the cup. The readings of the tea leaves laid to rest on ceramic glaze will be the basis of Wednesday’s leaflets. From here, I invite you to sit with your own cuppa and peruse what sensations this week’s tea blend has to offer.
At the end of each month, I invite a guest who will have their fill of the blend and transcribe a leaflet, featured only on Beobab.Tree.
Enjoying:
super groovy funk from Zamrock (💚Zambian psychedelic, garage rock, funk, and blues 💚) band WITCH, an acronym for ‘We Intend to Cause Havoc”! It’s a song I love to dance to in the mornings, or wiggle to as I write emails.
I love the call-and-response feeling known to gospel music at the 3:47 mark.
🌺Starry Nights (Feat. Neal Francis) - Adrian Quesada
🌺I love the sound of the organ, I loooove that the word for the instrument is “organ”. How it innately evokes the breathing body… when people play the organ it becomes an extension of their body and you can hear, feel it
🌺My closet - it occurred to me that I am dressing for the job I want: a librarian who surfs (in my training arc! Drop sustainable strength workout routines in the comments section below) and makes things.
I enjoy pieces that make me feel confident, sexy. Sexy to me means being comfortable, adorned and of power. I love colors, I love patterns. I love mixing and matching like I’m a living collage. I am.
🌺 I caved (thoughtfully—after much pacing in the children’s toy section of Target, fixing a furrowed look on my face so that passersby presumed I was shopping for a niece/nephew) and obtained a squishmallow, Kwame. This is what they call a hard launch, a ‘mallow reveal.
Upon delivering it home, I discovered Kwame’s bio on the tag, an homage to TY beanie baby backstories:
Kwame teaches high school history. This is his dream job since it combines talking about 'Mallow history and hanging out with younger generations. Kwame hosts his classes as interactive discussions and awards a prize to one star student every Friday! Think you can win this week?
He’s just like me fr. I really enjoy Kwame as head support for reading on the bed.
Fun history fact, in Kwame-fashion: Stokely Carmichael, Black nationalist and Pan-African revolutionary, later changed his name to Kwame Ture, in admiration and friendship with Pan-African leaders Sekou Touré and Kwame Nkrumah. The first presidents of Guinea and the Republic of Ghana, respectively.
🌺 Basketball is such a beautiful sport. On the way in/out of the rec center, there is a long window that looks into the courts. Some days it’s people hooping, other nights the space is used for recreational volleyball.
Passing leisurely, I love watching people,—this one man today, with over-head headphones—do drills where his tall body bounces left to right to left in cadence, it’s like dance. I admired for as long as it took me to be out the door again.
In Be Holding, one gigantic love poem to the legend Julius Erving a.k.a. Dr. J, Ross Gay makes the metaphor that basketball players are trees. And I love the image a lot.
🌺 Lavender & mint & chamomile blend tea
Here is some sweetness:
Inspired by Sally Wen Mao’s Ode to Emptiness
🎴Crying from a good book because it resonates with my lived experience with heartbreak, honoring my life now, then, and continuing. The book: Note of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin lent from the public library
🎴 Listening to my friend practice his guitar before our gaming session, a song by Pink Floyd. There’s a fuzzy warmth that sweetens inside you to hear a string instrument through the laptop speakers, knowing that its source is from your friend strumming along, miles away.
He sounds a little timid at first, but the technology medium helps him forget that I—really listening to him now—am there, so his confidence warms into a more mighty muscle practice of learning how to alive a song he loves.
When our other friend joins the discord group call, his hands halt, and through the microphone, “How are you, my SON!?”. I roll my eyes and ready to banter.
🎴Remembering so much of my progress is supported by people I’m in relationship with, and how important it is to genuinely keep those relationships nourished and reciprocal as possible. All the while, how important it is to want to get to know and meet my own capacity.
We owe it to ourselves to try, we are all on our own trajectories curving towards a shared center.
🎴The past week, I’ve journaled after some time of radio silence / hesitancy… I’m exploring that feeling as I go, and transcribing for Beobab.tree helps with tuning in to my internal world willingly.
🎴Friday, before I found jeans that fit me absolutely right, I went to a sushi buffet dinner with my parents — slurped some halved oysters dappled with cocktail sauce by my pair of chopsticks. A meal finalized by a cappuccino…evening caffeine is rare for me. And rightfully avoided.
Yet here I am (at the time writing this bullet point (funny how we call it “bullet point” and not something cute like “polka dot”)), piecing together the newsletter into the night.
Images in the tree bark:
I hope your day is kind to you and you are kind to you.
Warmed,
Isabel