This is a weekend to celebrate love and the beginning of a new year. The Year of the Tiger. When I think of tigers, I think of power, strength and wildness. Also, beauty and ferocity, a melding of light and dark. Tiger has much to teach us about these attributes.

This morning’s tea, a Chinese Jasmine, is a melding of 2 different types of plants, the camellia sinensis (tea) and a fragrant flower that opens only at night.

Jasmine flowers are plucked in the dew of the morning and gathered together for scenting green tea. As tea leaves are highly susceptible to absorbing scents, the marriage of these components in carefully controlled conditions produces a wonderfully fragrant tea.

I steeped the leaves for 3 minutes in 180 degree F water. The soft floral aroma greeted me as I lifted the lid of my glass teapot.

Glowing like a warm sunset, the tea liquor imparts a delicate, sweet flavor with an overlay of floral notes on the green tea’s vegetal character. A bright finish lingers on my tongue.

As I sip my tea, I catch images of sitting in a summer garden, drinking tea from fragile cups shaped like tiny eggs, the fragrance of blooming flowers all around.

As you can probably tell, I am so ready for spring’s arrival and its gentle fuzz of color as inner growth manifests once again in the outer world.

I have been thinking a lot lately about opening my heart and what that means to me. It conjures words like breathe, awareness, connection, listening, forgiveness, acceptance.

How do you open your heart?

Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.

~William Shakespeare