The Descent into Metal and What Time Does to a Tea
Autumn belongs to Metal, and the year has tipped into its dark half. The light keeps shortening from here, the cold settles in, and everything that spent the summer reaching...
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The Five Elements
This blog explores the Taoist Five Elements—Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water—as a living map for aligning with the seasonal rhythms of nature and life itself. By observing natural cycles of...
Letting Go of What Isn't Essential
Earth season is closing. On September 22 the light and the dark are equal, and after that the year belongs to the dark half. We move fully into Metal. Everything...
Method, Element, and Heat
Notes from Vessel: A Gathering of Clay, Craft & Ceremony. Part Two. Part one closed on a question to put to a piece of teaware: what tea wants to be...
What a Vessel Does to the Tea
Notes from Vessel: A Gathering of Clay, Craft & Ceremony. Part One. Over the first weekend of Vessel, Colin taught five classes. Different subjects, different teas, different rooms of people....
Feed Yourself the Way You Would Feed Someone You Love
The body understands Earth season before the mind does. By late summer, something has already started turning inward. Quietly, in the small decisions of the day. The desire for warmth....
Nourishment, Stability, Belonging
Way of Tea · August 18th 2026 Late summer sits differently than the other seasons. It is not the urgency of spring or summer's outward heat. It is full without...
Fire Gives. Earth Receives.
Summer is a season of outward movement. Fire expands, radiates, reaches toward others. The energy of summer is fundamentally generous: it gives light, heat, presence, connection. There is something beautiful...
Earth Is the Ground of Everything: On Late Summer and a Ritual for the Threshold
Way of Tea · August 6, 2026 We are in the between. The last of summer, the first hint of autumn. The light has already shifted — days are shorter...
Water Is the Mother of Tea
We spend the summer in fire's territory: the heart, the shen, the quality of connection. What it means to be genuinely present with another person, with a season, with a...