Ya-Ya's Tea Board

It rained all day today. And so it did yesterday. And the day before.

Yesterday, I lay in bed with a murderous headache and felt pretty sick generally, but today I was feeling good again. The weather, though, seems to be on a different schedule: it’s still raining cats & dogs. But the washed-out scenery that this (much needed) rain produced offered me a new and (ironically) rather clear insight into the true nature of the teahouse. For the first time, I saw the teahouse as the true sanctuary that it really is.

It is during rainy days that beauty in the city really stands out. When the weather is nice, a city can be beautiful: full of life, colours and sunshine. On a rainy day in the city, on the other hand, everything starts to look rather ugly: grey wherever you turn, puddles, hurried people leaping from one dry spot to the next. Personally, I think this is the real side of cities, but that’s just me.

When I arrived at the teahouse, the city seemed deserted; water everywhere, cigarette butts and wet leaves pinned to the ground. I started – as I usually do on a Saturday morning – by fixing & raking the Zen garden. Generally, this task is a bit of both, chore and pleasure. The ratio depends largely on the degree of damage done by drunken “savages” (that’s how we perceive them, anyways) during the previous night. Today, it was all pleasure and no chore in sight.
Raking the Zen garden gave me a great sense of pleasure as I saw the beauty of the calm patterns in the stones permeate the greyness of the surroundings. I felt as if I was able to bring a sense of sanity into this ugly world with such a simple task as arranging stones.

I knew business would be slow on a rainy day like that (people in Christchurch don’t like to leave their houses if it’s raining), but I was glad to be here. The teahouse felt like an colourful oasis surrounded by tones of grey. Warm, peaceful and full of tempting teas. What a great place to spend the day.
To my surprise, more people than expected had a similar understanding and filled the teahouse with a slow but steady stream of customers. We chatted a lot and watched the rain transform the city into an intricate network of drips, rivulets & puddles. It felt good to look out from our dry vantage point, a steaming cup of tea in hand…

The biggest surprise to me, though, was that most of our customers today shared my revelation about Ya-Ya’s nature. No less than 3 people today actually mentioned the word sanctuary in the context of their perception of the teahouse. To me, sanctuary is a pretty specific term that I almost never use, but today it seemed the only word that fit the bill!

My thanks go out to everyone who makes Ya-Ya such a satisfying and rewarding place to run.
From today, I will always regard the teahouse as a sanctuary for special people. I think they deserve it.