Just returned from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, finishing up the photography for The Spirit of Tea. Will be living in the San Francisco Bay Area and plan to publish my book by the end of 2012. Here is a small taste. More soon !

Just heard that the father of a fellow Tea Lover, Kevin Rose, passed away today. This post is dedicated to Kevin. My heart goes out to you.

My own Grandfather, Roy R. Neuberger, passed away on Dec 24th, 2010 at the age of 107 1/2.

I wrote the following for his memorial…

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I’d like to say a few words about the Beauty of Death.

Borrowing from Aristotle, a Syllogism:

To be born is beautiful.
To be born is to die.
Therefore dying is beautiful.

And then to paraphrase Epicurus:

“……. death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, but because it takes away the craving for immortality. For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.
“…death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.”

This echos the earlier words of the Bhagavad Gita (again to paraphrase) where on the battlefield Krishna says to Arjuna:

“You speak sincerely, but your sorrow has no cause. The wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead.”
“You were never born; you will never die. You have never changed; you can never change. Unborn, eternal, immutable, immemorial, you do not die when the body dies.”

Grandpa had no fear of death. He knew his time was coming and accepted it calmly.

But as a culture, we tend to fear death, to do our best to avoid it.
This is a pointless endeavor, for we will all die successfully.
And by living in fear of death, we also fear life itself.
For life and death, like day and night and yin and yang,
Are complementary and inseparable.
By embracing death, we can truly embrace our lives,
Transcend death and live in the ever unfolding present.

Grandpa has only left his body behind, but he still lives on.
He lives on in each one of you, and in my middle name
Roy R. Neuberger’s life is like a stone dropped in an ocean.
Just one man among billions
Yet the ripples of that life have travelled far.
And through his wisdom and generosity, he has touched countless people.
Artists and lovers of art. Investors and lovers of profit and loss. Adventurers and lovers of life

His beautiful life will live on in his beautiful death.

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Photographs of my Grandfather here.

Learn more about Roy R. Neuberger here.

I’ve been working steady for more than four years in China, focusing mostly on content, content, content for THE SPIRIT OF TEA. I’ve shot well over 100,000 exposures and have more than 90% of the images I need for my book. I will be taking one quick trip back to China in October for the remainder, and then coming back to California to sit down to edit and write.

But content creation is just one step in any successful production. To get the work out to the world requires brilliant branding and marketing. I’m extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to attend Tim Ferriss’  seminar Opening The Kimono in Napa this weekend. I really like his work and his approach to many things in life. The timing is perfect to give THE SPIRIT OF TEA a well needed shot of adrenaline. We’ve been asked not to share details of the seminar, but you WILL be seeing the results !

I’m in the Hong Kong Airport after a four month trip in China working on THE SPIRIT OF TEA. It was an exhausting, yet extremely productive trip. I’ll be writing more soon with stories about the trip and some samples of my recent work. Stay tuned !