The Teabag Project
At the beginning of 2011 I wrote (a letter) to several people to launch a small personal initiative called The Teabag Project. Zimbabweans, as well as people who have visited Zimbabwe, are in love with many aspects of this country, including our fabulous Tanganda tea. In a personal effort to stave off the growing Facebook empire and the transformation of everything personal into digital, I posted a letter and included a couple of Tanganda teabags to several people asking them to brew a pot, take some time for reflection and write a few words to me.
Words about anything.
Here’s something from The Teabag Project (start yours and share the words!) …
I wanted you to know how happy I was that you sent a real, live letter. With a stamp. Licked by a human. And you licked the envelop. And complete strangers in a post office thousands of miles away touched it. Spoke other languages over it. Yeow….now I have your letter as an artifact of you.
I love writing. Real writing. The written word. I weep for everything we lost when we moved into digital. Gone are the psychologically revealing strokes, contours, tensions and flourishes of hand-written text.
I remember when I moved from Connecticut to California. I was thirteen and I had so many friends back then that I hated to leave. The love was so deep and tangible. The promise of letters and connection truly kept me alive. Literally, kept me alive. Those first few months in California and away from my support system were excruciating. I wrote letters with tiny gifts of nature in them. I survived each day in the hope of receiving in return, a pebble, sand, a bottle cap, flowers from the curb, anything to remind me of home. You could never get such subversive items through the mail these days.
And did we ever really live in a world nuanced enough to be able to embrace the idea that children just might send bulging, odd looking envelopes through the mail because that’s how they knew to throw a lifeline? Despite the sadness at our separation, I think what we expressed was truly ourselves, embodied in the words and the physical expression of our letters. I felt the words as agents of feelings and energies that just don’t travel through cyber space. I feel a better knowing of someone from a letter as compared to a email. Ink on paper practically has a voice compared to the flat world of email transmission.