The Ritual Master Hello friends, and welcome to the first video of 2023 here on The Ritual of Reading.
I often find that January is a strange time for many of us. The holidays take the excitement levels so high, we are at a risk of finding the weeks that follow terribly dull. The weather doesn’t help much in lifting the spirits, so we end up disappointed, tired but under the pressure to start making life altering changes to our every day routine. Setting up goals is not something I’m against, but I feel that they need to come from a very personal space and not from the collective pressure that new years resolutions put on us. Besides, I much prefer having ideals than setting up goals. It somehow sounds more enjoyable and less like work. So I’m starting the year with small steps towards my ideals, one of which being a more mindful approach to my cup of tea.
After the feasts of December, I’m in desperate need for a time out and a gentle return to balance. There’s no better choice for this, than dark tea, and the best I could find is pu-erh tea. While the more well-known black tea is the oxidized version of the tea leaves, dark tea is fermented as well as oxidized. And its crown jewel comes from the Yunnan Province in China, the famous pu-erh. It comes in large round cakes, or smaller ones that you’ve already seen me use in other videos, but today’s treat is a special blend made for the luxury Chinese brand Shang Xia. The high levels of polyphenols and statins make pu-erh tea excellent both for digestion, lowering cholesterol levels and flushing some of the toxins we’ve accumulated during the holidays.
If you’re a regular here on the channel, you know that I enjoy discovering different teas of the world and I take the opportunity to learn something new with each tasting. But if I’m completely honest, I’ve been rushing through the experience in the past few months. The rhythm of life and my priorities have made me skip some steps in my most precious rituals. So in the new year, I’m focusing on my amateur tea ceremonies as moments of mindfulness. Not simply sipping the tea while I read or work, but actually making it the priority. Engaging my olfactory sense and my taste buds in a simple gesture of adventurous discovery.
And speaking of adventure… my reading genie has brought some exciting books my way this January.
A few months ago I came upon the book of Romanian biologist and explorer Alexandru Stermin, while listening to a podcast. Cazuti din Jungla or Fallen from the Jungle is his second book, a blend of scientific explorations of nature and the human soul. His academic career has presented unique opportunities of discovery : from the rugged coasts of Iceland to the pulsating Brazilian jungle, his research in ornithology has been the starting point of an eye-opening journey. The book alternates between adventure anecdotes, personal intimate reflections and scientific facts explained to the inexperienced reader. And while I was reading, my own state of mind alternated. I was fascinated by the science, and deeply touched by the essence of thought. Some passages, like the footsteps of big cats alongside humans on a river bed, or the letter addressed to future humans at the foot of the first Icelandic glacier to have disappeared, will never lose their power over me :
Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.
The book reads like a travel journal, a wake-up call for the state of our planet, but also an insight into our emotional human state in this time and age. I highly recommend it if you speak Romanian.
From the biologist I skipped over to the geographer, adventurer and writer Sylvain Tesson. I remember all the hype around his book La panthère des neiges when it first came out, and as always, the bigger the hype, the further I ran from it. Best sold book in France in 2019, it was translated into English in 2021 as The Art of Patience: Seeking the Snow Leopard in Tibet. Tesson was invited by friend and wildlife photographer Vincent Munier to go in search of one of the rarest feline species in the world, the snow leopard, in the Tibetan wilderness.
Reading this has been a gift, and in a strange way I’m glad I waited, because I felt I had the perfect state of mind for it. As you could expect, just like the previous one, this is a book with a profound ecological message. But what I didn’t expect was the level of emotion and linguistic delight I found in Sylvain Tesson’s writing. A passage on the herds of wild yaks :
C’était des totems envoyés dans les âges. Ils étaient lourds, puissants, silencieux, immobiles : si peu modernes ! Ils n’avaient pas évolué, ils ne s’étaient pas croisés. Les mêmes instincts les guidaient depuis des millions d’années, les mêmes gènes encodaient leurs désirs. Ils se maintenaient contre le vent, contre la pente, contre le mélange, contre toute évolution. Ils demeuraient purs, car stables. C’étaient les vaisseaux du temps arrêté. La Préhistoire pleurait et chacune de ses larmes était un yack.
They were totems sent down through the ages. They were heavy, powerful, silent, motionless : so unmodern! They hadn’t evolved, they hadn’t interbred. The same instincts had guided them for millions of years, the same genes had encoded their desires. They were resisting against the wind, against the slope, against the mixture, against any evolution. They remained pure, because stable. They were the vessels of time stopped. Prehistory was crying and each of its tears was a yak.
His unique blend of describing what he saw and what he felt in such extraordinary circumstances has been my unexpected gift this January. I was moved, I was mesmerised, I felt lucky to be so receptive to the words. And while I was reading, I remembered an unexpected encounter I had last year. While visiting the botanical gardens for the orchid show last February, I took a quick tour of the zoo as well. I didn’t film much, but I remember how troubled I felt standing in front of a pacing feline that seemed to never stand still : it was none other than the snow leopard. The Paris zoo is participating in a global program of breeding snow leopards in captivity, in order to save the species that is under constant attack from illegal hunters in the wild. I knew that its presence there meant safety and a chance for the species to have a future. But the perpetual movement was disconcerting. As if the tame, obedient, controllable inner me was distressed in the face of wild energy. There is majesty in the snow leopard, you almost feel the need to curtsy.
A mindful start to the year for me, taking my time to enjoy tastes, words, sounds and imagery. How lucky we are…
Until next time, enjoy your reading and your rituals !
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