January 10, 2025
The Peaceful Path of Tea: Interview with Teahouse Manager Jamie Morf

 

By Tova Green

“In the teahouse you learn to live peacefully,” says Jamie Morf, who recently began teaching tea classes at Green Gulch Farm. “We pay deep attention to objects and people. We use beautiful objects, old tea bowls, and scrolls. We learn to be both a mindful guest and a mindful host. As a guest you can fully drop into your senses. As a host I’m there to take care of and delight the guests.”

Jamie first encountered the practice of tea in 2006 when her mother suggested she go to Green Gulch for a retreat; she had been experiencing burnout at her first job out of college and was intrigued by the idea. She signed up for the “Way of Tea” retreat, which was also her first experience of Zen. Upon first seeing the Sowing the Moon Teahouse at Green Gulch, she says she was “taken by the jewel box of a room, tightly packed with other people.”

When Jamie returned to Green Gulch two years later for a Farm Apprenticeship, she asked tea teacher Meiya Wender if she could study tea. At first Meiya said no, thinking that Jamie would be too busy and tired out by the farm work to study tea. However, Meiya changed her mind and allowed Jamie and Yuki, another Farm apprentice, to begin studying tea when they asked again a few months into the apprenticeship.

After six months of the farm apprenticeship, Jamie left Green Gulch Farm to return to her work as a landscape architect. Interested in lay practice, she commuted to tea class weekly when she found a job in nearby Mill Valley. Jamie also continued her connection with her Zen teacher, Furyu Schroeder, and in 2009 received lay ordination and the Dharma name Komon Myotoku, Tiger Listen Radiant Virtue.

For five years, “I connected with Green Gulch through the tea house; I lost touch with the zendo side and kept the tea side.” However, Zen practice beckoned five years later; Jamie returned to Green Gulch for two practice periods and the January intensive, and then resided at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center for a year.

Jamie is still a tea student, and is now also the tea house manager. Every Wednesday she arrives at Green Gulch at 9 am to open the tea house, take care of the garden that surrounds it, and prepare for a class given by tea teacher Meiya Wender. She is currently in training to guide beginning tea students.

Jamie says she is inspired by some lay teachers she met at Green Gulch, particularly Sukey Parmalee and Wendy Johnson with their connection to working the land and receiving lay entrustment. She resonates with stories in the anthology The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-five Centuries of Awakened Women, which tell of Chinese tea women who were Zen teachers in disguise. She says she thinks of Meiya, Fu, Sukey, and Wendy as the “Buddhist woman elders I model myself after.”

In 2019/2020, Jamie received the Midorikai Scholarship at the Urasenke Professional Teacher College in Kyoto, Japan, where Meiya had studied twenty years earlier. Jamie is following the path delineated in the Urasenke lineage of tea, which involves several levels of licensure and receiving a tea name before being authorized to take on students.

In tea gatherings guests receive a bowl of matcha and a traditional Japanese tea sweet. “I’m an avid baker,” Jamie noted. “I like making beautiful things by hand. Making tea sweets is a tradition passed down from warm hand to warm hand; for example learning about the right consistency for the an (bean paste filling)—it has to be shown; you can’t get it from a recipe.”

Jamie is excited about the introductory classes Meiya, Jamie and two other senior students, Keiko Wright and Eri Brevig, will be offering beginning in February. “We need to get the next generation of tea students started,” Jamie reflects. “I feel deeply called to make tea widely available, as it has meant so much to me.” The Beginnner’s Tea Series of ten weekly classes begins Sunday, February 9.

Sowing the Moon Teahouse is open for tea gatherings the first Sunday of every month at 1:30 pm, by registration.