All the World in My Cup

A pure wind envelops my body.

The whole world seen in a single cup.

Kokan Shiren

Some mornings, my cup seems to hold all of existence in its depths. I fall in love with my tea and its earthenware vessel, with the battered oak table on which they rest, with the whole wide world and the deep blue space in which it floats, with my kitchen window and this shambolic, tattered old life, all over again.

Then I sit down in front of the computer to write about the experience, and I simply can't get the words together to describe how I feel. I manage one or two clumsy paragraphs, and that is all I can do - I craft a rapt little bowl of meager and woefully inadequate words to describe something vast and beautiful, something sentient and breathing and boundless and inexpressible. Emaho!