Ground

I begin with the ritual of making myself a cup of tea. Water in a kettle. Bluelick of flame. Sachet in earthenware cup.

It was 1:53 am by my clock when I rose, early in the morning, very. But I didn’t open my eyes until I had lain for some time in bed, assessing my body, determining that I was truly awake. I stopped setting an alarm years ago. These days, my only metric for arising is the body clock. Outside, it is a sunday January in early 2025, long before dawn. I can hear the wind rustling the bushes, running its fingers through the palm trees scraggly heads.

The moon is nearly full, something I ascertain for a second time descending the stairs- the rear quadrant of our backyard is silvered by her light. Stepping out there is a luminous stillness pervading.

Before I drink, sitting at the breakfast table where I write, I inhale the steaming cup. Currents of rising air are visible on its surface, and it smells of woodsmoke, tar, and soil. The name for this tea, Lapsang Souchong– pine wood small sort– refers to the pine wood it is smoked over, and the fact that these are the smaller leaves of the plant, the fourth and fifth picking. The originating legend of the tea is that it was created in China in 1646 by villagers in the Wuyi mountains of Fujian province who were fleeing Qing soldiers advancing through their area on the Manchu unification campaign. Before they fled, to avoid spoilage of the newly picked leaves, they accelerated their drying over pinewood fires, and then buried the tealeaves in sacks. This explains their characteristic bite of smoke and why they exhale earth. Partially oxidized, they were a hit with the Dutch traders who needed some form of preservation of the tealeaves to get them back to Europe over several months in the hold of a ship. They kept asking for more.

The elemental alchemy of fire, water, plants, and earth yields, on the one hand, this ritual libation in my cup: a ceremony at the inception of this book. On the other hand, five hundred miles south, Los Angeles is on fire. A slightly different alchemy, a reverse alchemy if you will, has seen ignite, over the past four days, the most expensive and likely culturally devastating wildfires in the history of that city whose founding nightmare certainly involved immolation. Carved from the desert with water borrowed from elsewhere, the city of angels stars in the paradisiacal dream of California.

The dark twin of the silvering of my backyard by moonlight is a photograph I saw yesterday in The New York Times of houses reduced to ashen footprints punctuated by eerily intact chimneys, cars wireframed husks of themselves, in the foreground some metal leakage– the car’s melted battery?– now formless, rendered down to a puddled slick of quicksilver.