Be the Tea: A Parable about Adversity
I was inspired by the following story (many versions feature coffee, but I drink tea!) to create an original t-shirt design through the fundraising site Booster. Shirts are $15 and all profits ($5 per shirt) go directly to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Order by December 28th: https://www.booster.com/be-the-tea.
A young woman is struggling through a difficult time in her life, and she seeks her mother’s advice. The mother leads her daughter to the kitchen, where she has placed three pots on the stove. After each has simmered a while, the mother asks her daughter to lift the lid of each of the pots, and tell her what she sees.
The daughter lifts each lid, one at a time, and then replies, “I see eggs, carrots, and a bag of tea leaves. Each is boiling in hot water.”
The mother nods, and asks her to look more closely. “What happens to an egg in boiling water?”
“It was fragile, but then it becomes hard,” the daughter replies.
“And what happens to carrots?” asks the mother.
“They begin hard, but in the water, they become soft and lose color,” replies the daughter.
“And what about the tea leaves?” asks the mother.
“The tea leaves turn the boiling water into tea,” replies the daughter.
“Yes,” says the mother. “Remember that. When in boiling water, the egg grows hard, and the carrots grow soft. But the tea? The tea changes the water it is in. When you find yourself in hot water, when you face challenges and adversity, strive to be the tea.”
As I face surgery at the beginning of next week, I have needed to remind myself of this tale, and its lesson, again and again: instead of letting difficult circumstances harden what is fragile, or weaken what is strong, use them to transform not only yourself but the world around you for the better.
Healing from cancer is a long and arduous journey. I hope you will consider supporting breast cancer research efforts by purchasing a “Be the Tea” t-shirt designed by yours truly between now and December 28th: https://www.booster.com/be-the-tea.
Thank you!
The book is subtitled “Advice on love and life from Dear Sugar,” but to label Tiny Beautiful Things as merely a collection of advice columns does not do justice to its beauty or wisdom. Strayed turns the conventions of advice columns upside down and taps into her own memories and experiences in her responses, doing “something brilliantly counter-intuitive,” as noted by the Public’s Artistic Director Oskar Eustis,” using self-revealing stories of her own life for generous purposes.” Strayed’s luminous and powerful responses to what are often heart-wrenching letters are some of the most lucid, honest, moving essays I have ever read.
My heart buoys and breaks over different matters these days, but Strayed’s words still speak to me. Gauging by the shared laughter and the unmistakable sounds of whole-audience-weeping in the theatre, they speak to many. (When the lights came up, Steve turned to me, both of us still wiping our eyes, and he said, “You didn’t warn me!”) It was a powerful performance.
And this, in response to a professor and class who asked Sugar’s advice to graduating college students: “Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.” (133)
There’s an article that’s made its way around the internet about the 
I’m looking forward to experiencing that revelation again, whenever it finally arrives. I know it might be a while. Until then, I try to remember what my friend Sarah said when I shared my frustrations with her about my lack of productivity, my inability to do all the things I need and want to do.
Still, as surgery looms on the horizon, I’ve grown more aware of how the language of aggression, while ostensibly empowering, also pits one against one’s own body in some curious and distressing ways. My sister-in-law Lisa, a survivor, mentioned her discomfort with this language shortly after I was diagnosed. Susan Sontag, in a 1978 essay entitled “Illness as Metaphor,” describes the dilemma: “The controlling metaphors in descriptions of cancer are, in fact, drawn…from the language of warfare; every physician and every attentive patient is familiar with, if perhaps inured to, this military terminology. Thus, cancer cells do not simply multiply; they are ‘invasive’” (714). The language surrounding treatment has a similar inflection: chemotherapy is “chemical warfare, using poisons” that aim to “kill” (715).
The main reason I resist is that none of us knows the future. That’s a fundamental truth. It isn’t that I don’t want to be healthy and cured—of course I do! But it feels like tempting fate to declare certainty in relation to a particular outcome; I don’t and can’t make predictions. I can only know the present.
If this is my life (and it is) and if my life (like all our lives) is finite, and if I don’t know its deadline (and none of us does), then how do I want to spend it? Waiting and wishing for a different kind of life, a different kind of day, a “better” one in some projected future? Or do I find a way to accept where I am in the present, since that’s all any of us really knows or has?
Kushner’s work is embedded in the Jewish faith, though his lessons are broadly applicable, drawing equally upon everyday people’s stories as well as religious texts and history for illustration. I’m a spiritual seeker who does not identify solely or specifically with any single faith tradition at this point in my life, though I feel there is something larger and greater than individual human desires, and I tend to imagine the sacred, in the broadest terms, as the realization of the combined forces of love and compassion in the world. So much of Kushner’s understanding of who and what “God” is (and isn’t) resonates with me, given that one of his truths is “God is Not a Man Who Lives in the Sky.” He writes, “To me, God is like love, affecting all people but affecting each one differently, according to who he or she is. God is like courage, a single trait that manifests itself differently as it is filtered through the lives and souls of specific individuals” (29). Love and courage: both profoundly human and deeply sacred.
In the later chapter on doubt and anger, Kushner explores another theme close to my heart, especially at this juncture in my life. I have always been a bit allergic to certainty, and he actively embraces the idea that we should raise questions, “admit our anger” when it arises, and affirm a “readiness to live with doubt.” To do otherwise means we’re avoiding truth and minimizing the complexity of any genuine relationship: “Accepting anger, ours and that of people close to us, has to be part of any honest relationship” (130), writes Kushner, and it’s only through acknowledging that the tough stuff is equally as valid as the good that we can love–that we can be fully present in any capacity, I would add–with our whole hearts.
Public support and awareness is a good thing, of course. Our local mall recently hosted a “Positively Pink Parade,” raising funds for the Every Woman’s Life program, which provides free mammograms to low-income, uninsured, and underinsured women in our area. Personally, I had the opportunity to attend a retreat for breast cancer survivors sponsored by our local breast care center. It was a powerful experience, both uplifting and draining, physically and emotionally. We interacted with other survivors, created healing art, asked questions of a panel of doctors. It was humbling and inspiring to hear the stories and witness the resilience of the women gathered there, several of whom referred to our shared experience as a kind of sisterhood.
Still Life, Beyond Cancer 