For the last year or so, through a constant surveillance of tea
discussion sites, I have enjoyed learning facts and opinions regarding
tea in its numerous iterations. Further, I have taken delight in a
lively correspondence that has sprung up with several other tea
infusiasts who haunt the same posting sites.

At some boards I have hidden in the weeds, watching and studying,
analyzing and classifying. At others I have, from time to time, opined
a conjecture or narrated a tea experience. At this site, I have lurked
for the most part, but nevertheless the discussions here have played a
wonderful role in my trek.

I have realized I would not know one-tenth so much as I know about tea
were it not for the resources available to me on the www. The sites
have, in many ways, served as fantastic ROSETTA STONES in my filtering
and making of meaning from what would otherwise be still a rather
nebulous subject-not that I am anything near an expert now. Far from
it!

I have also realized that the making of meaning, the connecting of
symbols with thought, creates ROSETTA STONE moments throughout our
lives. Great teachers have been, in my experience, ROSETTA STONES.
Even naturalistic observations can be ROSETTA STONES moments. I
noticed how a tree cast a sprinkler shadow in my yard, and I realized
at last how one mountain, Mt. Rainier, creates a rain shadow and a
desert. That was a ROSETTA STONE moment.

The horrible experience of those poor people in Mississippi and
Louisiana helped me, as I watched their awful tragedy unfold,
understand better the nature of humanity as a whole. That was a sad
ROSETTA STONE moment.

I would like to develop a blend of tea that I shall name ROSETTA STONE.
In fact, I might go over the top and call it Imperial ROSETTA STONE
Blend.

I shall, from time to time, search the Internet to determine whether
anyone has used the terms similar to my using them above after I post
these sentences here at this site. If any person does such a thing,
then I am entitled, by previous practice of another poster here, to
harp and burble and insult and attack and whine and defame, and far,
far, worse, to do so in language which, after careful study by readers,
makes no sense because it lacks any semblance of coherency.

Perhaps I will not carry on in such a fashion, because to do so would
mean more than simply that I have big ROSETTA STONEs. They would see
in me a microcosm of a world of sorry people in a dark, sad state: I
would have labeled myself a crank and an obsessive, one who lashes out
at the world, one who attacks what others build through great effort
and for charitable reasons, but will not himself build anything at all.

All the best,
~grasshopper