Mountain Gate Teahouse and Art Gallery
We are overjoyed to share the Way of Tea through Mountain Gate Teahouse and Art Gallery in the cloud-hidden mountains of Telluride, Colorado. Living Tea offers tea ceremonies, classes, and workshops to explore every facet of tea from the linear, biological, and practical aspects to the artistic, meditative, and ceremonial. At Mountain Gate, guest "tea folk" share their knowledge and experience, from classes and ceremonies to immersive retreats in Telluride. We integrate aspects of Chinese medicine, herbalism, and Taoist philosophy in our tea ceremonies and classes. We wish to share a foundational understanding of what it means to relate to tea as a Way, offering various brewing methodologies and tea traditions as we have learned them through our lineage.
Visit MountainGateTelluride.com to join us.
Just as tea has emerged in many forms through myriad facets of human life, so too has it attracted a diverse cast of characters whose love of the leaf borders on obsession. In the words of one such character -- art curator and surreptitiously famous author of the classic Book of Tea, Okakura Kakuzo -- “tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage.” This mysterious leaf has travelled a long and vast road through history; a path filled with adventure, intrigue, thievery, warfare, social revolution, caravans and cavalcades, currency and embargoes, fortunes gained and lost, friends and enemies, artistic expression, philosophical explorations, and at its misty-peaked heights, spiritual enlightenment.
While in the Western world we relate to tea as a casual beverage, China and Japan have long held traditions that reverentially regard Camellia sinensis in a different light. Pin Ming Lun Dao is a commonly used Chinese phrase, which means to discuss and understand Dao through the taste of tea. For thousands of years in China, all great discussions of the Tao, or the deeper questions of life, have taken place at the tea table.
The tea ceremony has long been regarded in Asia as a means of connecting with the essential in Life and Nature, with symbolic images and punctuations in the ceremony drawing the participants into a primordial space of connection to one another and the plant world. And while the history and lore of Tea paints a rich picture of what it means to live a Life of Tea -- one with clear principles, practices, methodologies, and traditions -- one can still deeply engage the Leaf without these superfluous details. Inherent in the Leaf is a reminder of the intertwining relationship between meditation, tea, and enlightenment -- Tea cannot be described in words, but only tasted directly right here and now.