..is Nonstophome's beverage of choice.
I go all the way to Trade Fare Market in Astoria, Queens several times a Year, and carry several bags of Maté back into Manhattan. The fact of these expeditions makes drinking the Maté more enjoyable, for it takes considerably more effort than would a trip to one of the Starbucks on every other corner in the vicinity of my apartment. I first encountered the beverage in the vivacious home a childhood friend of Uruguayan decent, and I assumed that the charisma in her household must have had more than a little to do with the drink, which was testament to her family's ability to preserve the rituals from their home country and to reanimate them in the unlikely landscape of west Los Angeles, a place often so hostile to authenticity that you would think it a prism of Disneyland.
When I finally made the journey to Uruguay, during my second year of college, I realized that Maté was more of a staple there than I had anticipated. On the boardwalk people of all ages carried special bags that held the thermos full of hot water to steep the Maté and the gourd full of the herb, a type of tea that is more like coffee if coffee made the mind lucid and cohesive instead of just more mechanically awake and kinda nervous. Hot water is poured over the herb and it is given a moment to steep, and then the steeped water is consumed by way of a metal straw called a bombilla, which is perforated at the bottom so that only the steeped water, and not chunks of the herb, arrive in the mouth and do their unique work. In Uruguayan homes, Maté was passed around the table at all hours like an inverse ganja. In classrooms, students sipped Maté and listened attentively.
Besides nourishing the mind with a molecule similar to but distinct from caffeine, Maté is full of potassium, the mineral that has us calling bananas 'brain food.' Something in the alchemy of minerals and molecules allows Maté to soothe the nervous system while still producing a sharpness of thinking superior to that produced by drinking coffee even in its strongest or purest iterations. And then, when you go to sleep after a day of Maté consumption, delta sleep states, the deepest, most restorative, and most lucid, are enhanced. I find myself dreaming up such aggressively parallel existences that I awake feeling as if I am walking two paths with the keen reconciliation of the sinister with the earnest that brings the oneness we yearn for. Maybe Maté is mildly psychedelic in that respect. I also awake feeling refreshed, and ready for another batch and another day-in-the-life.
Ritual is at the core of pleasure. I think we need the muscle memory ritual supports in order to effectively improvise on what we know by heart, and feeling, and so when I was in Uruguay for the first time and then a few years later when I went back, I made sure to embrace the graceful choreography of Yerba Maté consumption, and my mind and my body, thank me.
I have many thoughts on what it would mean if something like Maté became a cash crop, suffering the caricature-making of globalization. Of course, my fears are not futuristic enough, this process is already underway. I am at once detractor and beneficiary. Tea companies and health food grocers are selling mediocre versions of the herb, pre-bagged and displaced from the customs that accompany it in Uruguay and neighboring South American nations. "Everything is always changing and the measure of our maturity as nations and as people is how well we are prepared to meet these changes and to use them for our health," James Baldwin points out. In the case of Maté, now that it is being made more widely available, lets us not alienate the product from its past as we have done time and again with anything marketed as an agent of longevity and stamina, anything vaguely lucrative. Part of the agency of these items lies in the ways in which they can host rituals that create a more thoughtful community. I wonder why we are so eager to accumulate things and so wary of their legacies, as if having a history threatens the fiction of surplus and expandability that we cultivate in industrial societies, a fiction that makes us vulnerable to proliferating out of existence.
Wake up world. Drink Maté with your compatriots. Embrace old ways beneath the sun. Stay woke.
