Tea Party

"Some more tea, dear?" Gabrielle sang out, with more honey in her voice than lemon, as she spirited the ancient teapot from the stove, splashing the sacred substance beneath its copper lid. "It's a fresh pot of one of our rarer herbs. This one's from the mountains of Turkey."

"We love the mountain tea, dear," Uriel said in his more serious, intellectual tone.

"Its sagey scent with a rasp of blueberry is truly tempting," he observed, passing his iridescent amber tea cup around the circle of lightworkers to the ever vibrant and helpful Gabrielle.

The lifelong friends had been gathering Friday mornings since time began, it seemed. While they had a full agenda that morning, they seemed to spill more tea and laugh over the details of their work more than they cared to admit to Michael, their equally loving, yet more task-oriented, boss.

"How about you, too, dear?" Gabrielle chanted to another old friend gathered at the trillion-year-old rag-edged crystal table that seemed to magically appear in the florid gardens of Chamuel's front yard, where the group usually met. 

They delighted especially in this location each week, to allow Chamuel to show off one of his new flowers who would typically peek its beautiful, bright smiling face timidly over the top of the table. Like an inquisitive child, each one of Chamuel's flowers delighted in exploring what kind of tea the grownups might be sipping that day. 

Each of Chamuel's flowers would one day, in 200 years or so, grow up to be a fairy. But in the meantime, before the hardwork of building fairy kingdoms and teasing the terribly boring, much too serious, humans into brief moments of sparkling flights of fancy, they learned as they listened at the elder's weekly conferences. None was as well versed in the art of flights of fancy than this troupe.

"Oh, drat, what a silly thing!" Raguel exclaimed, unexpectedly piping in, as he quietly re-read to himself, albeit outloud, the anxiety-ridden e-mail from Michael that morning, asking the conference to assist the assignee with his problem.

On this morning, the group, in between tea pouring and flower admiring, was gathered to assist a city-desk editor write his daily column. This morning, it was about standing up for the rights and dignity of the animals, again. This bright, young man, had been an animal right's activist, hard core, if you know what I mean, for many years, and a frequent-flyer with his help request.  But, whenever he asked for help, the tea partyers were always there to help and quick with a wise response. 

Whenever a circus came to town, the young man was there, in the rain, with all the others pitching against the obscene use and display of the animals, whom he adored, even more than people most days.

"What's that, dear?" inquired the soft-spoken Raphael, whose great heart radiated a rich verdant healing hue whenever he spoke.

"Apparently, this young man, what's his name ....? Oh, Jon Ah, born in Beijing, attended Stratford U. for law and then switched into Journalism in his junior year, which meant he had to stay another year ....." Raguel's voice trailed off as he slipped back to reading Michael's dossier silently to himself, information the group already knew.  

His lips silently moving, he was unaware of the rapt audience waiting for the rest of his sentence. With tea pots poised in mid-air, brimming cups extended spilling tea, even the flowers and occasional mice who skampered beneath the table, all froze in place, waiting for Raguel to finish his sentence.

All the garden waited, expectantly, each word hung earnestly in the air, capturing their attention, calling them to witness to their precious purpose. Sometimes, dear Raguel forgot himself as he too, cared deeply, empathetically feeling intensely the feelings and emotions of each assignee, often pondering the meaning of each word's effect on each one's feeling heart. He cared, perhaps, a tiny bit more than the others because he, himself, felt each human being's feelings, about which they were often too careless to protect. Humans had not yet realized the power they held in their feelings and emotions and too rarely took counsel from their hearts over their intellect. Even Uriel usually agreed with Raguel over this matter.

"Dear, could you please tell us more about the question at hand? Please," Uriel implored. His tone almost pleaded with his own unique urgency, as he needed to know, immediately, before another word was said, what the problem was so he could consider some rational options, ideas, silently, as the rest discussed the ways and means of helping the young man.

........to be continued ......