Forest Tea Ceremony

Creating a Forest Tea Ceremony is a delicious and meaningful way to ceremonially close time in your wild sanctuary. Bring along a hot thermos and mug in a basket with you as you enter your wild sanctuary. Assuming you have the proper knowledge of which plants are edible (or not), move through the landscape with gratitude, eager to accept the nourishment and healing that comes through the sacrament of the land. As you find ones who will nourish and feed you, bring in small amounts to your thermos allowing them to steep. Once you have your tea to steep, find a place where you can sit and sink into the presence of the Sacred Wild. Sip your tea in a spirit of thanksgiving and loving presence. Pour out the last bit of tea to the earth as a gesture of gratitude for all you have been given.

This ceremonial practice is really very simple and solely relies on a few elements: 

• Tea

• A Ceremonial Worldview

• Gratitude

Let's look at these features individually.

Tea

I make my tea from foraged plants and trees in my homescape or bioregion. This requires a knowing relationship with our plant allies and forest friends. As a long-time urban naturalist, I'm fortunate to have a robust sense of what is edible and full of great nourishment. I prepare a thermos of hot water with a splash of honey and some lemon. Mindfully and with a posture of permission, I walk around the land asking permission from trees and plants to have a bit of their essence for my tea. In my bioregion, I will often ask Cedar and Douglas Fir to be the base of my tea. Depending on the season, I will add other plants like Nettle, Blackberry, or other seasonal berries; sometimes even herbs from my garden will be combined. I will allow this to steep for about 20 minutes.

"Learning how to forage is a major game changer for any human. These skills are our birthright, but sadly most of us didn’t grow up learning them. Gathering medicine and food from the wild connects us to the natural world, our ancestral heritage, and our wild animal selves. When we are more personally involved with our foods and medicines (by growing or gathering), we can be assured that they are fresh, of high quality, and harvested in a sustainable fashion. We also weave ourselves indelibly into the great food chain of life, which instinctively encourages us to steward and tend our sources of sustenance." ~Juliet Blankespoor

It’s essential to properly identify any plant before you harvest it for food or medicine.

If in doubt, do NOT harvest! Consult your local extension agent, master gardener, or trusted herbalist if you need help with identification. If someone else shows you a plant, do your own homework and make sure that they are right before you harvest. This ritual is a wonderful way to invite you into profound relationship with your local landscape, your homescape. 

Ceremonial Worldview 

We are able to intentionally engage acts of ceremony when we move from within a sacralized world view. When we see the Earth as God's Body (as Sallie MacFague frames it), or as the Sacred Wild as I refer to this Divine ground of being, then we are surrounded by the numinous; nature is full of sacred presence. This invites us to see every earth-based act (which, as earth-bound creatures, this is most of our activities!) as a ceremony. This has profound ramifications for how we connect to our places and treat the earth with profound respect. Says, Charles Eisenstein:

"A ceremony, then, is a special kind of ritual. It is a ritual done in the knowledge that one is in the presence of the sacred, that holy beings are watching you, or that God is your witness.

Those whose worldview has no place for the sacred, holy beings, or God will see ceremony as superstitious nonsense or, at best, a psychological trick, useful maybe to calm the mind and focus the attention.

Now hold on. In a worldview that does have a place for the sacred, holy beings, or God isn’t it true that He or She or They are always watching us, watching everything we do? Wouldn’t that make everything a ceremony?

Yes it would – if you were constantly in the felt presence of the sacred."

When I move through the forest by myself or accompanying others within a sacralized worldview, we move in the presence of the Holy Wild. Therefore, the gathering of the tea elements even becomes a sacred ritual. The preparing the tea and creating an intentional space is all part of ceremony. But stretch this out further. Everything becomes an act of ceremony and we all--even the more-than-human ones--become officiants. We become members of ministry ordained to serve our Earth as the Body of God. 
 

Gratitude

Once you have prepared a space in which to drink your tea (I will often co-create a nature mandala or draw a quadrated circle upon the land and sit within it), settle in. Pour two cups (at minimum); one more cup than the number of people receiving the tea. Breath in gratitude for your emplacement and for all the lives that are in communion around you. Attune your senses to the winged whispers of the wild. Sip. Make it sacramental. I will play with the eucharist language, expanding it to include this forest ceremony. "Take and sip, and see that the Earth is good!" Enjoy the tea and the perceived presence of the wild communion around you. When you have finished your tea, take the extra tea cup and intentionally pour the tea into the earth. This is a gesture of gratitude to the Spirit of a place. 

This ceremony has created the kind of meaningful and intentional closure that I have desired to honor the more-than-human world for their presence and the wisdom they offer me in how to live better upon this Earth.