Beauty in Imperfection: A Visit to the Shofuso Tea House

This week on Talking Tea we’re back in Philadelphia at Shofuso, an authentic, and quite amazing, Japanese house and garden with a fully functioning tea house and roji, or tea garden. We’re joined by Derek Finn, Shofuso’s site and program manager, and Morgan Beard of Urasenke Philadelphia,  an organization dedicated to practicing and teaching the Japanese way of tea.  Morgan is returning to Talking Tea after having been a guest on our “Artful Tea” episode. In this week’s podcast, Derek, Morgan and I hang out on Shofuso’s veranda, stroll through its roji and finally spend some time in its tea house, as we chat about how the way of tea, Zen Buddhism and traditional Japanese architecture and design come together at Shofuso to allow us to glimpse what Morgan calls the beauty of imperfection, and the beauty of life itself. More information on Shofuso, the Japanese House and Garden in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, including visiting hours, tours and events, is at www.japanesehouse.org and at its Twitter feed @Shofuso. You can learn about Urasenke Philadelphia's classes and upcoming events at its website, www.phillytea.org. For more information on Talking Tea and updates on new episodes, visit our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/talkingtea. To inquire about being a guest or having your organization featured, please email us at [email protected]. Talking Tea is produced and hosted by Ken Cohen. You can follow Ken on Twitter @KensvoiceKen.      This podcast features music from "Japanese Flowers" (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii/japanese-flowers) by mpgiiiBEATS (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii) available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Adapted from original.