The Tao of Teapots

I have a fetish, a love? Maybe a minor obsession. I collect teapots. Last time I counted Iwas up to twenty-one. It's more however than simply collecting for the sake of collecting. Idon't just put them on a shelf and look at them, never touching, never using. I put them tothe purpose for which they were meant and that purpose is, I think, the reason I collectthem. There is something profoundly peaceful about the act of brewing tea, pouring it from a well loved teapot and sipping while curled in my favorite chair with an old friend of a book.

It almost feels like a guilty pleasure and is something I rarely do when others are around. Taking one of my teapots down from the shelf and using it has, over the years, become like a retreat. An escape, however brief, from the course of the day. A few have been gifts but most I have found myself. I have a few generic teapots, a sterling silver teapot. One of my sisters gave me one ages back made from fired clay with oriental dragons that my husband once dropped and chipped the spout off. My mother in law gave me another of fired clay that resembles a squat tortoise like dragon. For the days I'm in need of a goofy smile I have one in the shape of a frog. There's a Winnie the Pooh teapot, a couple oriental style pots and one I found in a flea market with stylized Greek figures that I adore and I'm sure is worthless.

Of course it isn't just the teapots themselves. It's the whole of the act. Choosing the tea, brewing it, choosing the pot and filling it, pouring it out. The smell of the tea that fills the kitchen. The little curl of steam from the mouth of the pot. It's an age old ritual that seems to require you take your time. We spend every day counting each minute, marking each hour between work and play, sleep and chores. We demand everything be faster, faster, faster from our internet to our food. Making a pot of tea now and then reminds me that it's alright to slow down and not watch the clock. It gives me precious time to do that most important thing for a little while that we so often forget to do...nothing.

Life these days is fast. I highly recommend to anyone suffering the stress to go out and find a teapot that speaks to you. If tea isn't your thing, a French Press and some good coffee will do just as well...but that's another article.

My duty as a human being.

I have been convinced for a very long time that people simply do not care what happens to others unless they're directly related to them. Not my family, not my problem being the silent motto of people everywhere, but certainly here in the states. I have seen children beaten in public malls while passersby studiously look the other way and walk quickly past, inured to the pain of another because they don't know them and so they don't matter.

I've experienced this personally myself. My first year in this city I was hit while riding my bike. At a busy intersection, in a parking lot with cars lined up to get out. There must have been twenty witnesses to see me hit, thrown through the air and thirty feet from my bike. I don't remember being hit. I woke staring up at blue sky, bruised and bloody from my slide across the cement. Not one of those people sitting in their cars waiting for the light stopped to see if I was even alive. No one bothered to call the police. Too busy, in too much of a hurry and hey, they didn't know me and so...I didn't matter. In a daze I got my now dented bike and walked it up the road to a restaurant. I went inside to have a look at myself in the bathroom and found I was a bloody mess, head, shoulder, arm, hip and down one leg I was road rashed and bloody. Here was yet more evidence of the distinct lack of care. None of the employees at the counter who saw me come in, nor the few customers standing in line, said anything, not even to ask if I was alright.

I am not one of you. I am incapable of seeing another hurt or in pain and looking the other way. I have stopped a mother from beating her child in a mall and been lectured by mall security about butting in where I don't belong. My inability to 'butt out' has caused more than one argument with my husband in the past. I was once riding the bus home from work. As usual at that hour it was packed. A woman and a man got on, smiling, and sat up front. A moment later he changed, standing above her yelling and pounding her in the face with his fists. Thirty people sat on that bus and as I looked around, every one of them was looking out the windows, pretending they couldn't hear his yelling or her screams. I stood, I screamed at him to stop and in surprise, he did. He stared at me for a moment before running off the bus and into the night.

I went to the woman who was reduced to sobbing and trying to staunch the blood and suddenly, as if they had decided it was now alright to care, the other passengers surrounded us. They offered napkins and tissues, asked her if she was alright and in all ways tried to pretend they had not been willing to watch her beaten to death just moments before. My husband was incensed. After much arguing, yelling and discussion I came to understand he was scared for me. Scared that the man I stopped might find some way to find me and exact revenge. I would do it again. In a heartbeat. Which spawned more arguments and eventually an uneasy truce where he accepts he can't change what I did nor that I will likely do it again in future.

Today I learned I am not alone in my need to care for the victims of the world. A retired Nepali soldier took on forty armed men with only a knife, all to save one girl from being raped. Of his actions he said "I prevented her from being raped, thinking of her as my own sister...Fighting the enemy in battle is my duty as a soldier; taking on the dacoits in the train was my duty as a human being."

My duty as a human being. This is how I feel and how I wish more people could feel. If more people understood this simple instinct, perhaps there would be fewer abused children in the world, their cries falling on the deaf ears of their neighbors, their bruises uncomfortably avoided by their teachers. Each time you turn a blind eye to the suffering of another when you have the chance to stop it, you cheapen the human spirit just a little more. It is our duty as human beings to help those who need us whether its standing between a woman and her attacker or a child and the parent who sees only a convenient, defenseless target. Don't think 'I don't know this person, it's not my place.' Rather remind yourself that it could be your son or daughter, brother or sister, mother or father and wouldn't you hope that some kind soul would care enough to save them if you weren't there?

Bishnu Shrestha you are a hero sir and an inspiration. Thank you for knowing your duty as a human being.
Article: Lone Nepali soldier defends potential rape victim against 40 men.

Meet the Blue Box Angel.

Any fan of the long running, well loved British Sci-fi series Doctor Who will recognize my name. I grew up with Doctor Who, watching since I was five or six. Safe to say it helped to form the person I am today. It taught me to be open minded, to ask questions and seek knowledge; to look up at the stars and not see stars but potential. It taught me to dream and sparked my creativity and imagination. It taught me not to judge on appearances or religion, that no matter who we are or what we look like we all have the potential to be extraordinary.

If you're shaking your head and muttering to yourself right now that I am a geek, you're quite right. A cheerful, unrepentant geek at that. Yes, a science fiction show taught me how to look at the world and everything in it. Anything that can open a child's eyes to a wider universe should be lauded and respected. Yeah it's a television show and in some ways no different than any other. It's the philosophy behind it and present in every episode that I challenge others to watch and not respect.

I am a grown up who still remembers to jump in puddles and yes, hopes one day to hear that distinctive wheeze and find a blue police box inexplicably on a street corner with the door ajar.