Leaflet No. 14
This week’s leaflet tea tastes like … eucalyptus, petals, chamomile in syrup, a half-heard song, shea butter, and chickpeas
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 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:
🌺eucalyptus shea butter
It wasn’t always the case that I’d lotion my entire body after every bath. I grew up going to swim classes in the evenings where we’d shower in the rec center’s facilities, and the cadence was always, “Hurry and finish, so we can get home and do homework and eat dinner”.
Much of my teenhood, I’d only worry about pampering the visible parts, like my face. Somewhere down the line I learned that to be a “pretty girl” you’d need to have a clear, soft face. We are shown by ads and media that people dread aging, when there are many ways aging is beautiful. For example, the eye wrinkles one can only earn from a practice of smiling.
1. One can age beautifully. 2. A lot of the systems that are selling us ideas on aging are the ones contributing to environments that “age us” sooner. I think of allostatic stress.
Decolonizing is buttering up your entire body.
Hear me out: it interrupts the moment with slowness, with time loving every inch of your racialized body like no Western beauty standard ever could. When I give my entire body the tenderness and moisture it deserves, the seeds of self-love can break ground.
Something about being shea-buttered correlates with being beloved.
The way I hold and squeeze my hands as I knead the oil into the ridges between fingers. I watch my hands embrace with a passion that I thought only Lovers could do.
🌺pickled garlic from the Turkish grocers
Not a meal goes by these days when I think about whether to pop a little pickled garlic or five into my bowl.
🌺 sticky rice cooked in coconut water, sided with something savory, like curried chickpeas, or a fried egg with a spinach/shallot/vinegar/olive-oil choppy sauce (I like savory breakfasts :d)
🌺 “Mi Buen Amor” & “Tu Falta De Querer” - Mon Laferte
If you hear this blasting from a vehicle, it’s likely I’m inside with my eyes clenched in deep song. Fist pounding the rim of window. Hopefully the car will be stationary. We’re both in traffic.
Love like this…
Here is some sweetness:
Inspired by Sally Wen Mao’s “Ode to Emptiness”
🎴On a Wednesday, two friends spontaneously called me from an outdoor restaurant in Miami (a Spring-minded reprise from school in Lexington, VA). They said they called me because...they were under a enormous tree, the trunk—from the looks of the facetime call—was the width of a picnic bench!
One friend was sipping guava juice, the other, guanabana. We spent our time talking about fruit and how Miami was treating them well. As they described their plans, they gifted me these images of them dancing salsa & bachata, meeting new folks, and enjoying it all. It made me really happy:’). My friends deserve unlimited guava juice and leisure!
There is everything about the “this reminded me of you!” call/text/nudge that has one feeling so cared for, recognized, and remembered.
🎴Listening to my dad read to me a snippet an article on the internet. The way he enunciated the end of a sentence reminded me of his voice when I was little, of how he’d read me library books before bed.
Sonically, it was playful, and contained no anger or stress. This memory hasn’t been embraced in a long, long time. With all these years of tension and growing pains, it’s nice to be reminded of one another’s inherent softness, this I feel sure.
Like, the other day, I found him watching one of my baby videos of me crawling towards the camera lens— he said he was organizing the computer, haha.
🎴This text exchange with a friend:
🎴Not falling tired of the same meal eaten 4 times in a row.
Deets: watercress, feta, mom’s salad dressing I have particular purpose to learn (it’s the way there’s shallots in here…) , lemongrass & ginger chicken, rice crisped with olive oil…goodness.
🎴It was Joëlle’s bday weekend!! And they brought their universe to the DMV! We caught up on hugs. I got to deliver an issue of Orchid Magazine to a fellow artist pal, see some familiar faces, and enjoy with every ounce of my existence: shredded lamb on a bed of whipped hummus. Fried cauliflower on a pretty puddle of tahini.
I was using bread with the best stretchiness (let’s have another essay titled “Bread Technology”) to mop up everything in my field of vision.
*As our table’s attendant was about to scoop up my arguably-done plate…*
-Oh! 🎵I’m sorry, I appreciate that but I’m still working on it. *To a friend* This plate can be a lot cleaner~🎵
🎴A person I met at Jo’s bday dinner was kind to drop me off at a metro stop closer to where my car is. Saved me a good half hour—thank you! We co-DJ-ed the ride home and recognized each other instantly when the topic of SiR’s “Chasing Summer” album came up. Here’s what’s soft:
Singing with someone you just met. Singing can be such intimacy especially when you don’t do it formally or publicly. To be heard *really* singing is to be exposed. But no negative connotation here.
So when it comes that I sang, simply because the song calls for your participation, he goes, “Can you queue this song next—?”, and then moments later he’s singing. He’s crooning. This is R&B— the sounds get soulful, yearning, vulnerable real quick. It was comforting, it was cathartic. It was very sweet to me.
🎴Working at a café with coworker/friend, comparing notes on how to be you own best advocate. Best practices with meeting people with different levels of emotional maturity. Life dreams! Y’know, the whole gambit.
Images in the tree bark:
I hope your day is kind to you and you are kind to you.
Warmed,
Isabel