Tea with the Buddha

On right action, right presence, and a perfectly imperfect bedtime routine

Last month I wrote a piece called Breakfast with My Grandparents in which I mentioned, almost in passing, that my daughter Emma has taken a liking to tea. What I didn’t fully convey in that piece is that Emma doesn’t just like tea. Emma loves the whole ritual of making tea, which is a distinction that matters enormously if you know anything about Emma or about the Buddha, both of whom have always understood that how you do a thing, doing it the right way, is often more important than the thing itself.

As with all things tea, it starts with boiling water. Emma boils her water in an electric kettle. She then hand selects her decaffeinated black teabag, always preferring the Barry’s brand, both for its Irish origination, and for the fact that it shares the same name as her maternal grandfather.

Next up comes the mug choice. Most days Emma chooses the one she gave me for Father’s Day one year that reads “The love between a daddy and his daughter is forever”. It has a silhouette of the two of us painted on the backside from where the words are and if it’s not that mug, then it’s the one with the hearts on it that she made me in preschool.

After the water has reached 212°F, Emma pours the hot water carefully over the teabag and steeps it for approximately thirty seconds, because she likes her tea on the gentler side of strong. She then measures out two careful teaspoons of raw organic cane sugar and stirs them in, and for the final touch, in classic Irish fashion she goes for the milk. The whole full fat milk, not that wimpy 2% kind or God forbid, the skim.

If the gallon is half full or less, Emma manages it with impressive confidence. If it’s closer to full, the situation becomes what I can only describe as, athletic. I have learned to position myself nearby without appearing to hover, which is its own particular parenting skill that I am only just now learning to develop. On the occasions when a small (or large) amount of milk finds its way onto the counter rather than into the mug, I try to remember the age old wisdom about spilt milk and the crying thereof, by taking a deep breath, and handing her a paper towel. I have probably taken too many photographs of Emma making tea already. I just can’t seem to stop myself.

Tea is predominantly a weekend morning thing for Emma. Weekdays don’t offer the casual time lines that make the tea ritual a realistic possibility. The other evening though, on one of those nights when it was just the two of us at home, I was just about to announce that it was time to begin the bedtime routine when Emma looked up and asked if she could make a cup of tea first. Time Cop Jim registered his presence immediately, noting the hour with his characteristic precision and filing a quiet motion about the implications for bedtime. I, as in Higher Self Me, acknowledged the motion and then gently overruled it. It was decaf. What harm could possibly come of it?

So we went to the kitchen and I watched Emma make her tea, and as she was finishing up the ritual she asked a second question that stopped me completely.

“Daddy, can we watch the Buddha slideshow while I drink my tea?”

Now, this might sound like an unusual request from an eight year old, but the unusual part dissolves entirely once you understand the history of our relationship with the Buddha.

Sometime around the age of two and a half or three, in the early strange days of the pandemic when the world had narrowed itself down to whatever we could reach from inside our own walls, Emma and I discovered a seven minute YouTube video called Images of the Buddha. The video is a quiet slideshow of statues and figurines and sacred spaces from around the world, set to gentle music, the kind of thing that asks nothing of you except to be still for a few minutes and let your eyes rest on something beautiful. We watched it over and over and over again, the two of us on the couch in the particular suspended quiet of those early pandemic mornings, and something about it settled into both of us in a way that neither of us has ever entirely let go of. Through the years each of Emma’s stuffed animals picked their favorite Buddhas. Kitty liked the one with the sunshine streaming between the Buddha’s fingers. Lamb liked the Greystone Buddha because the gray and white tones matched lamb’s colors perfectly.

Emma’s relationship with the Buddha goes deeper than the slideshow. From the time she was two or three, she built little houses out of her Magnatiles to shelter her figurines, and somewhere along the way those houses became temples. When Emma finally completed her potty training and was offered her choice of reward, she did not ask for a toy or a treat or a gumball machine. Emma asked for two Buddha figurines from the Asian import store in Lincoln Square. She knew exactly what she wanted and she knew exactly where to put them; inside her carefully constructed Magnatile temples.

So when Emma asked for the Buddha slideshow with her tea on a quiet evening last week, I didn’t hesitate for long. The bedtime routine would start later than I preferred. Sage Jim made the executive decision, Memory Maker Jim stepped to the microphone to second the motion, and Time Cop Jim - who is very good at his job and who I have no desire to fire, only to occasionally override - was thanked for his input and asked to stand down.

We took our tea to the front room and settled onto the couch to watch the Buddhas in all their many forms move quietly across the screen for seven minutes while the music played and the evening held still around us.

In Buddhist teaching there is a path of eight practices, each one beginning with the word right — right understanding, right intention, right action, right speech, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. They are not commandments or rules but rather orientations, ways of pointing yourself toward what is actually true and actually good in any given moment.

I found myself thinking about several of those practices that evening with the Buddha.

Right action is choosing the thing that is actually right rather than the thing that was scheduled. The dishes in the sink are not going anywhere. The Finch app will still be there in twenty minutes. The seven minute slideshow and the girl on the couch with her mug of sweet milky tea? That was the right action on a rainy weeknight in April.

Right understanding is knowing, in your bones, that there are no real deadlines on an evening like that one. The urgency that Time Cop Jim brings to the bedtime hour is not false: routines matter, sleep matters, and I know all of this, but right understanding also means knowing when the routine serves the relationship and when the relationship deserves to come first, even briefly, even just for one round of the Buddha slideshow.

Right concentration is the practice of being fully present with one thing. Not the to-do list. Not the dishes. Not the clock. Just Emma, and the tea, and the Buddha moving quietly across the screen, and the particular quality of stillness that settles over an eight year old when something genuinely peaceful finds her.

Perfect Moment Jim, who had been the part of me who spent years engineering the conditions for the ideal experience and then rewarding himself accordingly, did not script this evening. He allowed it to arrive, and it arrived more completely than anything he could have arranged in advance, which is perhaps the quietest lesson the Buddha has been trying to teach me since Emma first started building temples out of colored magnetic tiles on the living room floor.

Lately I’ve been looking at old photos of Emma more than I used to. My wife Christiana was always the one who would find the old videos and send them to me, the keeper of the photographic record of Emma’s earlier years, and I would receive them with gratitude without quite feeling the full weight of them. Something has shifted in me recently though. I find myself scrolling back further, lingering longer, feeling the tug of something I can only describe as wistfulness for a version of her that is already gone and a version of us that was already complete without knowing it.

Emma is growing so fast. She is becoming so beautifully, startlingly herself, and I am learning, slowly and imperfectly, to let that be the gift rather than the grief.

After the slideshow we rinsed our mugs and Emma took her bath. We opened the Finch app and went through the end of the day checklist and then it was time to brush and floss. We recently got a new package of floss picks with two different colors of picks; green and purple. On her own, Emma declared that the green ones would be for the nights when Christiana is working and purple ones for the nights when she is home. Green is Christiana’s favorite color. Purple is Emma’s. On the nights her mother isn’t there, Emma reaches for the green ones without being asked, holding her mother close in the small and quiet language of color.

If that isn’t right intention made visible, I don’t know what is. The wish to keep someone present even in their absence, and the understanding, held in the hands of an eight year old, that love doesn’t require a person to be in the room in order to be felt.

We turned out the light, said our prayers and then did our deep breathing and body relaxation like we do every night, even when mommy is home. As Emma dozed off at the end of our reiki exchange, I stood beside her for a few extra minutes in the dark the way I sometimes do, the two of us breathing in the particular peace of a day that ended better than it began.

The Buddha most certainly would have approved. So too I think, when he saw the end result of it all, would Time Cop Jim.

Tea with the Buddha, lamb and kitty