A Rumination: Here’s the Tea

On airplanes, empires, and a very loaded cup of Keats & Co tea. | By Malikai Smith

When I’m not writing Good Store blogs or working my 9–5, I’m a flight instructor at a local school, building toward the 1,500 hours required to apply to the airlines. It’s a lot of time: time at the airport, time in the air, and, inevitably, a lot of time thinking about airplanes.

After one (otherwise unremarkable) lesson, I remember walking across the tarmac and thinking about them. Not airplanes themselves, exactly, but the idea of an airplane. All the raw materials needed to construct one exist on Earth, with or without us. And yet, for billions of years, through arthropods and ants and antelope, nothing was mining ore or designing turbine blades. It wasn’t until humans came along and got the (admittedly wild) idea to take to the skies that an airplane moved from possibility to reality. The potential was always there; it just needed to be realized. Like a sculptor coaxing a figure from stone, suddenly: a Boeing 737.

The same could be said for just about everything we peculiar apes get up to. From planes, trains, and automobiles to movies and recreation, so little of our time is spent strictly on survival, and so much of it is spent on… everything else. Which, somehow, brings us to tea.

On the surface, tea seems simple. It’s really just a leaf, flower, twig, or root, cultivated and steeped in hot water. But leave it to Homo sapiens to complicate things. There’s a surprising amount of potential in those humble ingredients. Much like the leap from concept to airplane, humans saw opportunity in tea, and from it came empires, fortunes, trade routes, and upheavals that shook nations; all, in some sense, in the name of chamomile.

But it’s not all drama. Alongside the history comes beauty. A quick glance back finds John Keats enjoying a cup while writing some of the most enduring poetry in the language. In his time, London favored black and green teas—Bohea, Hyson, Gunpowder. By comparison, we’re spoiled. “Sweet Briar Botanical” has a certain charm that “Gunpowder” just can’t match.

These days, your tea doesn’t have to cross the Silk Road or pass through the hands of the East India Trading Company to reach you. Keats & Co tea is ethically sourced, sustainably produced, and unlikely to end up tossed into a harbor. It makes for a far easier cup to enjoy in the morning.

Keats wrote, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever; its loveliness increases.” His namesake tea company tries to take that to heart. A cup of tea that leaves the world better than it found it is a small, daily kind of beauty. And if a hot, caffeinated mug is already one of the highlights of the day, all the better that its benefits extend beyond the cup. In this case, toward funding tuberculosis treatment—an especially meaningful tribute to a poet lost far too young to the same disease.