Today, we enter 大寒 (Daikan or Greater Cold) — the coldest and the final of the 24 solar terms, introduced from China to Japan over 1,200 years ago during the Nara Period through agricultural observations.
From Lesser Cold to Greater Cold, flowers in Japanese tea rooms transform, mirroring the rhythms of the seasons — from Shuixian and Wabisuke tsubaki (Camellia Japonica) to the delicate, yellow buds of Robai 蝋梅 (wintersweet).
Zhuangzi《莊子》, a foundational text in Taoism, opens its Inner Chapter 1 with Free and Easy Wandering (逍遙遊), not with philosophical analysis, but through myths, parables, and improbable imaginative transformations — the adult equivalent of Roald Dahl or Enid Blyton — in beautiful, poetic language.
This text does not speak in the language of logic, but through imagination to reengage our senses, to stir our emotions, to draw us into solitary conversations with the larger worlds beyond the limits of reason.
Carrying us beyond our relative world, so often confined by the hardware and software of the limited human lens — to cross thresholds, to wander into a vastness that is quiet, yet wondrously alive beyond time and space.
Ushering us back to becoming ourselves, once again. To the person who once dream of becoming.
In the winters of our lives, how do we continue to bloom, to become, to find inner freedom? Zhuangzi reminds us that the heart can widen as the spirit learns to roam, even in the depths of winter.
Tea and Zhuangzi’s Xiaoyaoyou 《逍遙遊》
The following short essay on Tea and Zhuangzi is part of my 2024-25 photo essay collection (38 pages) for paid subscribers.
An unpublished essay exploring tea and a classical text in dialogue on the meaning of inner freedom – a text whose spirit of freedom, naturalness, and harmony has long shaped the Way of Tea in Japan and inspired countless poets and sages, from Tao Yuan Ming to Bashō and Baisao.