Hevel

There is an old word for vapour. Hevel.

It comes from an old book of Hebrew poetry, where it is usually translated as “vanity.” The word itself is plainer than that, and more physical. Hevel is the breath you can see leaving you on a cold morning. The vapour lifting off a kettle.

Watch that vapour for a moment. You can see it. It rises and drifts and catches the light. But reach out and there is nothing to take hold of. Only warmth, and a little water left on your hand.

In that poem, that is the word used to describe all things in the world. Not that things do not matter, but that they are less solid than they seem from a distance. Real, and beautiful, and impossible to keep.

The water you are about to drink was a cloud once. It will rise as vapour and be a cloud again, long after the bowl is empty. It only pauses, for a while, in your hands.

Every session begins, and every session ends. The bowl fills and empties. The leaves open in the heat, and then they are spent. The vapour rises into the room and is gone.

This is not something to mourn. It is the reason to pay attention. The bowl is worth holding because it will empty. This arrangement of people, water, leaf and light will not gather again in quite this way.

But something does stay. Not the water, not the leaf, not the vapour. Only the love it was poured with. Tea becomes love, made visible.

So the practice is small. But as Mother Teresa said, there are no great acts, only small ones done with great love. So sit down. Boil the water. Notice it while it is here.