That watch still exists. I have lugged it around with me since I first destroyed it. Whenever I unearth it from some drawer or box I have hidden it in, I cannot help but feel guilt. It is a constant reminder of the years it took me to become resourceful enough not only to disassemble, but also to reassemble.
One of the frustrations of practicing chanoyu in America is the lack of appropriate utensils. Granted the Internet has made this less of an issue, but still there are things that are not readily available. I have spent my adult life searching art and craft fairs, and antique and consignment shops for that rare find, a suitable western piece that will work for tea.
Over many years of study, I have developed a sense of what foreign object will work in tea’s highly stratified world. My home is littered with objects that do not make the final step to being useful in the making of tea. Japan has spent close to a millennium defining and refining these objects, so why do I think I will find one willy-nilly while wandering around a crafts fair.
It has happened: a beautiful white tea bowl found in Door County, Wisconsin, and another bowl stumbled upon in a northern Maine coffee shop. But these are the outliers. Other objects I have made, partially out of a sense of frustration but also out of curiosity and a need to be hands on in my personal tea ethos.
This pursuit of a personal identification with the material world of tea is not always met with approval. Tea is a conservative practice in the way that period musicians only use instruments appropriate to that time; no Switched On Bach for them. And so, it is thus with tea.
Change is not bottom up but top down. It is not the purview of the general membership but the responsibility of the few. This is with good reason. As with most earthly constructs, chanoyu is a fragile thing. Change has ramifications, mostly unanticipated. Tea’s oeuvre is firmly set.
That said I have a library of tea books and a basement of tools, neither of which I can ignore. Once I get a design in my head, the above resources are put to work, and sometimes, if I am lucky a useable piece is constructed. Of course, this is an unorthodox approach.
In the book, The Spirit Of Tea, the then Grand Tea Master Sen Soshitsu XV touches on this subject in the chapter titled Selecting. I have read its twelve lines many times to try to understand where the boundaries between seriousness and frivolity lie. In this, I have been unsuccessful.
There are many ways to truth: scholarship, spirituality, physical practice, and the disciplines of arts and crafts. To be successful in the selection, or the design and building of tea utensils requires resourcefulness. But how to keep the ego out of it, well, chado, the way of tea excels at that.
April 2019
