Tea Ritual Celebrates the Beauty Found in a Single Moment

O ne chance, one meeting.

Toshiko Takeshi quietly enters a small, almost completely unadorned room in North Hollywood. She quietly announces that she is going to serve me a cup of tea.

I do not get my tea for 20 minutes.

But Takeshi, who lives in Granada Hills, is no Denny’s dropout. It takes 20 minutes because in that time she will invoke--through simple, understated actions--a universe of peace, harmony and contemplation steeped in centuries of religious and artistic teachings.

It is the Japanese way of tea.

“I think it is mostly about manners,” said Satoko Gotcher of Canoga Park, who has been taking tea lessons for three years. Takeshi has been studying for seven years.

Their teacher, Soen Clarkson, politely avoids answering questions about how long she has been doing tea (adherents of the art avoid the term “tea ceremony”), but she studied in Japan and the United States for at least 10 years before receiving her honorary “tea name” of Soen.

Her given name is Yoriko, but she doesn’t use that much here. “In America, when they try to say my name, they say it like vacuum cleaner, Eureka,” she said with characteristic good humor. “So, I use Soen, but my husband, he calls me Donna.”

Clarkson’s husband is a pianist for Bob Hope and other performers. Twenty years ago, he built a small studio in back of their Spanish-style home in North Hollywood to use for rehearsals and practice. She persuaded him to let her build a traditional tea room in it.

Like everything about a traditional tea, the room is built and furnished according to centuries-old rules.

The walls are of wood and rice paper screens, the floor is covered with tatami mats. There is a plain bud vase, a wall scroll and a small stand that will hold the tea utensils. Cut into the floor is a space for the iron kettle that holds the boiling water.

Clarkson now has nine students, one of whom is a man (until about 100 years ago, only men participated in tea). One of them is currently in Kyoto, Japan, studying on scholarship for a year at one of the leading tea schools.

“It is like another world back here in this room,” said Gotcher, who like Takeshi was born in Japan. “Quiet. I don’t have to worry about the kids or anything else out there.

“I can go back to myself.”

Gotcher and I--the guests--take our places on the tatami mats, sitting on our knees. Gotcher and Clarkson, who watches from the side, seem perfectly content in this position. After about three minutes, I am in agony.

“Just sit any way you feel comfortable,” Gotcher said reassuringly. Allowances are made for outsiders. It’s part of the etiquette.

Takeshi gives the cup that is to be used a quick rinse with hot water from the kettle. She uses a wooden spoon to take a small amount of powdered green tea from a red and black lacquered box and places it in a round cup. She adds more hot water and then mixes it with a small bamboo whisk.

The whisk, on closer examination, shows the care that goes into each utensil. It is made of one short piece of bamboo, with the 100 strands of the whisking end individually carved out and wrapped in thread by hand.

Takeshi goes through all the steps, including numerous refoldings and straightening of a red napkin, with deliberateness. But her actions, all of which are done in accordance with the traditions, are not mechanical. It seems to be a moving, working meditation, harking back to the ritual’s origins in Zen Buddhism.

With the tea prepared, a cup is pushed toward me. I learn later that the proper etiquette is to rotate the cup so that one does not drink from the side where an artist has made a design.

“We respect art,” Clarkson explains later with a smile. “We try not to put our lip over it.”

The tea has foam atop from the whisking, like fine espresso. The taste is mild and pleasing--wholly unlike the strong green tea normally served in Japanese restaurants. It is gone in a few, satisfying sips.

There is much more to this type of tea ritual. Questions are asked, again in accordance with tradition, of the hostess about the various utensils that were used that day and what craft worker made them. There might be a discussion about the flower bud in the vase or the message on the scroll.

An advanced host will have chosen all these things so that a theme, often based on a bit of centuries-old poetry, is subtly expressed. This is why adherents of the art spend years studying art, religion, history, ceramics and wood.

But anyone can enjoy the effects of all this care in making a cup of tea.

There was one moment during the preparation when Takeshi upended the wooden ladle over the kettle, letting a few drops of water drip back into it. Suddenly, in that one instant, the drops, iron kettle, wood and sound of water quietly boiling invoked in me the same feeling I get when taking a hike in the woods after a rainstorm.

It only lasted a few seconds.

A friend of mine, Yashushi Zenno, has studied tea for several years. “There is a saying in Japanese that means ‘one chance, one meeting,’ ” he says. “Doing tea, you learn that even though the process might be the same, the feeling is never the same.

“The season, the flower, the tea cups and utensils, the scroll, the weather, the guests, the kimono you are wearing--the combination will be different. Never in the universe will there be a moment like this, again.

“It makes you appreciate much more, because you know this moment never repeats itself.”