24 Season Tea Journal & Forever Calendar

This tea calendar follows the traditional 24 Season Farming Calendar of Northern China, and includes places for your notes and reflections—as well as 8 contemplations for the 8 primary seasonal markers. 

The calendar is good every year [the days of the week are omitted] and can be picked up to begin making your marks in any season.

Here in an excerpt from the introductory pages, to give you a sense for how to use this calendar. Let it be a companion for you in connection with the seasons, wherever you live, and wherever life takes you.

how to use this book...

Book of Seasons

The information in the book can help augment your tea time and transform it into ritual. When you sit with your tea, you can note where you are in the season. A book of seasons is about being at home in time; getting to know your corner of the tao in all its seasonal shifting nuance and beauty.

24 Seasons

When you open this book, you see a seasonal approach to time reflected in the pages. Each two-page spread is one season in the traditional 24 season farming calendar from Northern China. Each of the roughly 15-day seasons has a colorful name that reflects the agricultural origin of the calendar.

Local Seasonal Field Notes

One way to use this book is to make notes of your own observations of seasonal change where you live.

Tea Journal

Using this as a tea journal, you could note which teas you’re drinking on a given day. You can note the circumstance, the tea, and your impression. Some people may wish to draw their teacup (for example) every season or every day, making a ritual by means of repetition.

Sense Diary

You could broaden to include other parts of your day beyond tea, and use this book as a sense diary, by noting one smell or taste from the day.

Festival Calendar

You can use the calendar inside to mark holidays for yourself to celebrate the seasonal cycles. You can use this book, and these festivals to: connect with friends, send a note at the beginning of a new season, invite someone over for tea to mark the transition, or to engage purposefully in rest.

Keepsake

Throughout the book are 8 keepsake pages that mark the thresholds of the major seasonal shifts. Each has seasonal prompts to play with, and space for your marks and musings. These are also the times you'll receive new teas from Via Tiempo, if you are on the seasonal tea journey.

With imprints of your journey through the seasons, leaving traces here on these pages, this book becomes a keepsake. Today's notes are tomorrow's memories. Photos, memorabilia, written notes, drawings in any medium—you could draw you teaware or adhere your tea leaves.

With traces, they don't need to be clever, profound, or "creative". The marks become an imprint of a time and place, and carry a magic that isn't dependent on their content.