Death’s Tiny Tea House – Online Silver Dragon

Date: February 27, 2025

Time: 1:00 - 3:00 pm - Thursday, February 27th

Location: ONLINE

Address: 6401 Northeast 10th Avenue, Portland, OR, USA

Price: $20.00 Minimum – Sliding Scale - no one turned away for lack of funds
Email us about program

Death’s Tiny Tea House – Online Silver Dragon

February 27, 2025

1:00 - 3:00 pm - Thursday, February 27th

The Five Remembrances
And, at the same time, we live and practice in a culture that generally discourages
discussion of dying, death, and grief. Death’s Tiny Tea House will provide Silver Dragons (those at least 60 years old or have a life threatening condition) in the community an opportunity for an open conversation about death and related topics.

 

Discussion at this Tea House will start from Ajaan Chah’s talk “Our Real Home — A Talk to an Aging Lay Disciple Approaching Death”  https://accesstoinsight.org/lib/thai/chah/bl111.html

“Anyone can build a house of wood and bricks, but the Buddha taught that that sort of home is not our real home, it’s only nominally ours. It’s a home in the world and it follows the ways of the world. Our real home is inner peace. An external material home may well be pretty, but it is not very peaceful. There’s this worry and then that, this anxiety and then that. So we say it’s not our real home, it’s external to us, sooner or later we’ll have to give it up . . . Our body is the same; we take it to be self, to be ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ but in fact it’s not really so at all, it’s another worldly home. Your body has followed its natural course from birth until now it’s old and sick and you can’t forbid it from doing that, that’s the way it is. Wanting it to be different would be as foolish as wanting a duck to be like a chicken.”

 

The Tea House conversation will be facilitated by Zen Teacher Kodo Conover and ZCO member David Seikan Snyder. Hopefully the discussion of Ajaan Chah’s talk will embrace our personal questions, confusions, and fears. As we age it becomes increasingly important for many of us to identify our real home.

Each Tea House will open with a short period of Zazen. We will introduce ourselves and explain what brought us to the Tiny Tea House. After that, we will just allow the discussion to flow. At the end of the Tea House everyone will have an opportunity to express how they are feeling or anything that is on their mind and heart.

Date: February 27, 2025
Time: 1:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Location: Zoom
Price: Free/by donation Specify any amount; $20 suggested donation

 

Leader:
Kodo Conover