Re-read my old field notes on the pause before tea

Going through a moving box at 5am and found the notebook from my fieldwork on tea ceremonies. I'd written pages trying to describe the exact silence between when the host sets the bowl down and when they speak — called it 'the room re-learning its shape.' Thirty years later I still think that's the closest I got to the truth of anything. Sunday morning, tea in hand, notebook in lap. That's the whole show.