A proper cup of loose-leaf tea takes about ten minutes. The kettle five, the leaves four or five more. I used to find this annoying. Now I look forward to it.
Something happens in the gap between deciding I want tea and being able to drink it. The phone goes down. The kitchen settles. Whatever I was doing two minutes ago starts to feel like it was happening in a different room.
It's not productivity. It's not even rest, exactly. It's just — a small enforced calm, ten minutes long, that I didn't have to schedule.
Most weeks I unintentionally don't allow or make room for myself much stillness, but the time I spend at the kettle, the stillness seems to find me.
I came to loose-leaf tea late, and by accident.
A few years ago I flew to London with a small group from my church and a Tulsa college ministry, on a mission trip. We spent the week walking the city, learning its neighborhoods, praying and sharing the gospel with the people we met. By midweek I had settled into a routine: each morning, before the day started, I'd have a cup of Earl Grey with cream. I figured this was the place to really lean into something that was new to me. I had been dabbling with tea at home for a few months prior and for the first time in my life. I explored the realm of tea enough to know I liked it, but not enough yet to know what I was doing.
The first afternoon I had to myself, I boarded the Underground and went looking.
I got off the train at Covent Garden because someone had told me about the market. I came up the stairs onto cobblestones and Victorian glass arches, street musicians playing classical pieces for spare change, and even before I'd found a shop I'd already understood why people come here. The whole place felt like somewhere a story would happen — slightly out of time, slightly storybook, slightly more itself than it had to be.
I wandered for a while. The first tea shop I found was Whittard. It had creaking wood floors, dark beams, and — somehow, in a space barely bigger than my kitchen — two whole stories. You climbed down a narrow stair to reach the basement level, and it was lined floor to ceiling in tin canisters and dark wood. A woman behind the counter pulled the lid off a tin labeled Covent Garden and held it out so I could smell — black tea folded with peach and apricot, and something floral underneath I couldn't quite name. I didn't know tea could smell like that. The shop and its vibe felt the way I had hoped a shop might feel.
I came back to Tulsa with several loose-leaf tins. Covent Garden. Piccadilly. A floral oolong called Garden Party that I keep meaning to write about on its own. These were my favorites and I made sure that I bought enough to share.
What I didn't know yet was that I wasn't really bringing home just tea. I was bringing home ten minutes.
If you've never brewed loose leaf, the practice itself is small. You set a kettle on the stove. You measure out leaves into a mesh basket or a teapot. You wait for the water to come to the right temperature — not boiling for a green, just-boiling for a black — and then you pour, and you wait again. Three minutes. Five at the most.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
But here's what isn't often mentioned when you start: the waiting is the practice. Not the drinking. The waiting.
You can't speed it up. You can't multitask it well. The water heats at the speed water heats. The leaves give themselves to the water at the speed the leaves want to give themselves to the water. You stand at the counter and you watch steam start to rise from the spout, and the only honest thing to do with your attention during that interval is be in the kitchen.
I have started timing my mornings around it. Not because I need the tea, exactly. Because I need the ten minutes.
Now the cup goes wherever the work goes.
When I sit down to write, the cup comes too — set on the corner of the desk, steam still moving in the lamp light. When I'm sketching, it's there beside the brushes. When I'm writing a letter, I'll often pour a fresh cup right before I begin, because something about the warmth of the mug in one hand seems to slow the other hand down to the right speed for authenticity.
You don't need a fancy setup. A small kettle. A mesh infuser or a simple teapot. A cup you actually like to hold. That's the whole kit. Add a thermometer for the precision; skip it if you want some added adventure. Tea is a remarkably patient teacher either way.
The leaves I keep coming back to are still those top three from London. There may be better tea companies in the world, probably. I've discovered that when I stumble onto a product or company that I really enjoy I almost subconsciously develop brand loyalty. With these teas, I know that when I open the tin marked Piccadilly on a Tuesday morning in Tulsa, some small and quiet part of me is back on the sub floor of that shop, in the creaking wood-and-tin room, and the day starts a little gentler than it would have otherwise.
A small, repeatable rebellion against speed. That's all tea is, really.
It's enough.
