Alicia likes a Venti Green Tea, no sweeteners. I tried Alicia’s drink today, here is my review.
This is a drink that pauses life. A drink that agrees with time to slow down so one can gather and appreciate the perspective time celebrates. It is a drink that one enjoys, of course, and it is also a drink one approaches with a certain satisfaction about…oneself. It is then a drink that allows one to pause in a safe place, a safe time, and reflect on the wellness of all things. Like time with Alicia.
The drink easily refreshes, as cold tea will do, because it caresses one’s inner-being that always needs a certain attention and moisture to compete and defeat the dryness of stagnation. And then it begins to heal, again, as tea will do, and it does so with reminders that flash by and share their beauty, their pain, and their hope for a better morning and midnight.
This is the drink that would be lovely on a chilly morning overlooking an impossibly blue lake that allows one to see nothing but blue when one looks straight down to clear, ever so clear water. This is the lake that Washoe native peoples who lived here for six-thousand years simply called it “dá’aw,” meaning “The Lake” and which we now call: Lake Tahoe.
And those who live there or were born there still call it “The Lake” and “Tahome.”
Like Alicia.
Life centered around The Lake, and the people found healing in plants and perhaps…tea. The Washoe are unique because they are not related to other tribes in the area and so it is still a bit of mystery who they are, how their language formed, and where they came from.
What is known is they loved their daughters and held special religious services to celebrate and honor their girls as the girls grew up and became critical to the daily lives of their parents, of their tribe, and of the land. The girls were celebrated. If a family had two girls, then both were celebrated. Both girls were valued.
Those traditions seemed to fade as the people changed around the lake and America was formed. But maybe not. The Lake dominates the area still while new daughters take up the task of understanding the land, understanding life’s struggles, and celebrating daughters who will inherit the experiences of so many women before them.
There is nothing stronger than gentleness it is said, and to raise strong girls one must understand the toughness within the tender; the strength inside that reflects on the outside; and the seemingly unique ability of girls and women to change something they don’t like. To overcome. To fight back. To be part of the land, take from the land, and understand the simple beauty of being part of the land and in control of one’s life.
Like Alicia.
This drink will, in those moments of solitude that one needs, facilitate acceptance of one’s power over one’s fate. Acceptance of one’s fate is the power of now. Of today. Of this very moment that sets a new course because of actions and decisions that are settled and enacted to rescue, push forward, unleash the power within and the power granted to each of us to fully commune with our destiny.
This is a drink I will enjoy when I want to commune again with and inside nature like Alicia. To be nurtured by the simplicity of tea. To be infused with the gifts of the land that sustain, heal, and helps one to enjoy the moment of pause that life allows so that we know intrinsically that the answer is “Yes.”
Yes it has been hard. Yes struggle is always present. And like Alicia who celebrates her life and her growing Lake Tahoe girls, I will drink this tea and remember to celebrate my own growing girl.
This then is Alicia’s drink.
Copyright 2019 by Myron J. Clifton. All Rights Reserved.
Dear Dean 