SweetPersimmon

In these dark days, it is always good to have a few books to curl up with to take us away.   Here are two more books that I have added to my...

Trying to understand the wabi aesthetic of the tea ceremony is very difficult because it is difficult to quantify.  One of the principles of...

It is not often that we give ourselves permission to love, or let alone talk about the things we love. These days it is hip and cool to be...

“There was a Chajin of Sakai who had a tea caddy called Sessan and he used it when Rikyu came. But Rikyu thought nothing of it so its owner...

As the days are getting longer, our tea classes are increasingly held in the darkness that fills the autumn evenings. At the Ryokusuido Tea...

Aki no ni sakitaru hana o yubi orite kaki kazoureba nana kusa no hana hagi ga hana obana kuzubana nadeshiko no hana ominaeshi mata fujibakam...

It seems like overnight, we went from the warm pleasant days of September to the chill showers of October. It is indeed fall as the leaves ...

One of the humblest tea utensils is the bamboo tea scoop. Historically, tea scoops were made of wood or ivory, but Rikyu began to make tea s...

C.H.A. Creative Handmade Art With the study of Chado (Way of Tea) comes the appreciation of beauty. C.H.A. is a Show and Sale of A...

I wanted to write something about this as the last post was about desire and achieving goals. So often I compare myself to other people and...

I tried grinding my own matcha last week. I used some Gyokuro, which is leaf tea grown and processed like matcha, only it is not ground up. ...

The Japanese are famous for packaging. Even when you buy vegetables at the market, they wrap or tie them up in very pleasing ways. Depart...

When people approach something with a passion there is always the excitement of learning something new. Many times I see the various stages...

Throughout the ceremony, the hosts and guests both aspire towards a sense of tranquility. The priest Takuan wrote of preparing for a tea cer...

I went out to my garden to pick flowers for chanoyu class. At this late date, there are very few flowers left. After the previous night’s ...

The aesthetic of wabi permeates and defines beauty for the Japanese culture. It is the ideal of Chanoyu yet wabi often is difficult to defi...