The Chance Encounter

You can also follow ChanceEncounter@notes.whatthefuck.computer on Mastadan , or ChanceEncounter.EUG on Instagram and Threads. This is where The Chance Encounter 's updates and tea business blogging will go. There's a lot of overlap with what is being written about on The Lion's Rear Site Feed too.

Last weekend I spent three days brewing sencha tea for friends and strangers off a small trail near the headwaters of Eugene's Amazon Creek system. After doing a recce early in the week, hiking up from Martin St through the Headwaters, I had planned for four mornings, Thursday through Sunday but on Thursday evening I developed a migraine headache that kept with me through Friday morning. This still allowed for me to sort of sink in to the space a little bit over the course of those days and get to see it in a couple of different moods and temperaments.

It's really interesting to see the same space over the course of a handful of days, the way it is subtly the same and subtly different. The weather was gracious, the mornings filled with a wet chill breeze coming up through the pines from the town below. On Friday I watched raptors ride thermals up through the headwaters, and on Saturday morning I pulled my samue tight to repel the cold air while the first water boiled. It's 85-90F/~30C today, I'm glad I scheduled this as I did.

These headwater trails are clearly a sort of informal third-space for the folks who live up on Fox Hollow, I felt like I was intruding at times in to the regular lives of the folks who lived up there. Over the course of the days I saw a lot of people multiple times, and they would wave down friends to tell me about how neat my little tea idea was, but no thank you i would not like a cup. If you say so, enjoy your hike!

Finding my way to the headwater of the creek was a home-coming, in a way. The creek, and the bike paths along it that connect south and west eugene to downtown and the broader river trail system, has been a back-bone of how I navigate Eugene. The creek, oddly, became one of the primary factors that lead me to move to this place, to living in Eugene. As often living on Chambers as when I lived on High, I use the Amazon creek system to get to the grocery store and to get to "nature", and this chance encounter captures the essence of that experience flowing from the ridgeline and the area around spencer butte, down to Fern Ridge Reservoir and the Long Tom River. From there it flows in to the Willamette and the Columbia.

Early in the week I did a recce hike and it was hot and humid, the lower half of the little canyon you hike out of was without wind, you could smell the forest humus rising from the floor.

the breezeless valley
can't wash away humus stench
on this summer day

ferns cover the ground and moss climbs
each tree trunk droops down like Hoh

It really is a neat little rainforest-like microclimate back there; perhaps the comparison to the Hoh Rainforest is unfair, but here we are.

The place I set up, off a wide trail near the top of the trailhead, which lead in a short loop to another trailhead parking lot and back, offered shade in the morning and a nice breeze most of the day, a lovely spot with some obscured views of the town, and, if you craned your head right, Spencer Butte's bald cap.

I bought one of those little grocery carts you see people take on the bus with crappy solid rubber wheels and cheap casters. My tea table and some water and a blanket and some chairs and other base essentials fit in it even though it didn't handle the trail very well. Fine enough, barely. I'm going to have to consider coming up with something different to get water out to my next deep woods encounter.

Overall, this kit allows me to put together and teardown a tea service in under five minutes, it's a very slick setup and there's not much I really want to change except to affix a permanent sign to it, and to enforce the wheels and axles. Perhaps I'll 3D print a trashbag holder for folks to get rid of their paper cups.

I ran a jetboil on a low folding camp table for the three days and did not consume nearly as much fuel as I expected. One of the primary concerns I have had in building out this portable system and developing the tea service ritual is water temperature management. Boiling water in the jetboil and cooling it in the aluminum kettle pot rather than boiling the water directly in the pot as I did in the first chance encounter let me more carefully manage the water temperature by mixing waters at different temperatures. It's also much quicker because the jetboil has a bunch of heat-conducting fins on the bottom. I just need a kettle with a radiator to cool the water, now, and i'll have fast and precise control of the water temperature. Or I can just keep pouring and testing and nearly burning my finger tips!

The expensive portable tea table was the thing that hinted this traveling practice could be whittled in to a simple ritual I could bring anywhere, but it has a few design drawbacks that lead to much extra needing to brought along. The table originally came with an isobutane stove but one of the feet on it broke off and I haven't fixed it; ultimately, the jet boil setup is nicer, I think, and this leaves me a bit more room to carry some teaware, but I need to carry the jetboil and the tea itself outside of the green briefcase. It's still nice that that thing fits in my bike pannier bags though, I just foresee myself needing to design my own at some point in the future.

I brewed some of Obubu Tea's finest senchas, and a few contrasting teas from my personal collection. I will not review or describe these teas, this is not the business I want to be in. I am in the business of sitting down in front of you and showing you the incantation. They're listed here so that folks can go buy samples:

• Kyoto Obubu Wind Sencha

• Kyoto Obubu Kabusecha

• Kyoto Obubu Natural Gyokuro

• Watanabe Yabukita Sencha

I offered two alternatives at times to provide a contrast to the viriditas of the shaded senchas: a really luscious and nutty Chinese green tea, and a 20+ year aged and fermented tea cake evoking the humus and moss in the valley below.

• Via Tiempo Seasonal Tea Co's Anji Bai Cha

• J-Tea's 2001 Da Yi Shou Puercha

It was nice and interesting to sort of draw people out of their routines and their plans and bring them in to a shared space. The trail was not heavily trafficked, perhaps I should have been closer to the Spencer Butte-bound trailhead to attract more folks but I think it was difficult for people to believe that the liquor I had on offer was invigorating and refreshing. It's a fair belief, but one I intend to continue rattling. I served maybe two dozen folks in total, with some friends and repeat drop-ins who sat to chat.

On Sunday I wrapped up early and went with some of my friends who had been taking tea with me, across the street and up to the Cascades Raptor Center, a cool wildlife rehab hospital with a few dozen really beautiful and cool ambassador birds.

The vibes were good, and I think people really enjoyed the tea. I'll probably wholesale some and hope to sell some sealed packets to folks on the trail in the future, but I want to find a source for decent porcelain kyusu to pair them with, along with a copy of my A Very Quick Introduction to Japanese Tea Brewing . My biggest fear is handing someone leaves that they can't get a grip on on their own. Not like you should have a license to brew, but I need to build a gentle on-ramp if I am going to have customers some day.

What's next is not to build on-ramps for customers. What's next is not to become a tea influencer. I will not review your tea samples on my tea blog. What I am offering right now is an act of public service. It's an act of generosity, a chance to stop and smell the proverbial roses and bring that practice forward in our lives. By quietly soliciting donations and danna, I "made" less than 20$ over these three days after I spent twice that on that Da Yi cake Thursday afternoon. And that is what I want, ultimately, for these events to be geurilla marketing for a service to arm and train you to build your own sencha ceremony and to integrate it in to your spiritual life as a healing ritual.

I have at least three more chance encounters planned before the end of September, which I'll talk about soon. I really do consider this sort of thing public service, right now, I'm not being disingenuous when I say this. My situation and history as a technologist has left me unmoored from the people and places that I live with and this work is a part of my own process and of positively influencing others'.

I have been cagey about my plans because they weren't and aren't solid enough to count on. I had hoped to spend September - November studying tea on a tea farm outside Kyoto, but alas, I am under-qualified for such an internship compared to the other applications they've got. No hard feelings, I'll keep training on my own. The rest of my life has been turbulent as well in this time, I am still an under-employed DevOps Thought Leader and much else is in turmoil this summer, but tea continues to be an anchor for me and a chance to bud my own community. This fall and winter I would like to find a place indoors where I can hold smaller private senchado experiences as a way to introduce people to the product i'll some day sell, and in the mean time I'll begin to cultivate an online/meetup community of sencha-ists and tea drinkers.

In my down time, I've been reading up on senchado, the sencha tea ceremony, with the aim of sharpening the craft and practice of presenting sencha to folks. I am somewhat repulsed by the ritual-ization that most folks point to of this craft, of the matcha ceremony-ification with the robes and the tokonoma, the low entrance; of schools, of teachers and lineages. But the alternative is out here in the wilderness, where reading poetry and translated works from 50 or 100 years ago I wonder how I could possibly hope to do it any differently. That is the purpose of the Chance Encounter: a long-term research vehicle for the modern day tea monk. You'll find me walking the streets and the edges of town serving serenity in a cup, a Psalm for the Wild-Built of sorts that can perhaps also be summed up by Baisao and translated thus by Normal Waddell:

A gift of "immortal buds" sent from an old friend
"first spring picking from Ekkei fields," he said
Opening the packet, color and fragrance filled the room,
Proud "banners and lances" of outstanding quality.
Clear water dipped at the banks of the Kamo
Well boiled on the stove, just right for new tea.
The first sip revealed an incomparable taste,
Purifying sweetness refreshing to the soul.
No need wasting time on "butterfly dreams,"
Rising up, utterly cleansed, beyond the world,
I smile, not a single word in my dried-up gut,
Just the "wondrous meaning," beyond all doctrine.

I've been poor so long, pinched with hunger,
Now a kind gift to soothe my parched throat,
Dewdrops so sweet they put mana to shame:
The fresh breeze rises round me, lifting me upward.
It doesn't take seven cups like old Master Lu says,
My guests get old Chao-chou's "one cup tea";
And whoever can grasp the taste in that cup
Whether stranger or friend, knows my true mind.
Sake fuels the vital spirits, works like courage,
Tea works benevolently, purifying the soul.
Courageous feats that put the world in your debt
Couldn't match the benefit benevolence brings.

A tea unsurpassed for color, flavor, and scent,
Attributes the Budddhists like the call "dusts",
But only through them is the true taste known,
They are the Dharma body. Primal suchness.

Last Friday, I set up the tea table underneath a 150 year old cherry tree in the Owen Rose Garden and invited folks to come taste sencha with me. I invited some friends, and the morning-of I put a small note on the /r/Eugene subreddit inviting folks to join me. About a dozen in total joined me and I brewed a gallon and a half of sencha and had some really nice conversation with friends and strangers alike.

And I did not take a single photo of it myself, nor did any of my friends. If you took a photo at this event, I know at least two were taken, I would appreciate a copy of it 😊

It was a good way to kick the tires, and I have a de-brief/postmortem document for myself. The weather was nice and the air was not super pollinated, and it was a great success. I have a lot of other thoughts and feedback that I'll fill in to future chance encounters. It's real now, though.

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The Chance Encounter is a semi-pro tea house. The Chance Encounter is brought to you by a semi-pro computer programmer. Let me explain.

I left my last full-time job in November of 2019 after five years of the highest highs and lowest lows. I said I would take six months off to ride my bike and travel and get my head straight and then I'd catch hold of another technology company slash capital-fueled rocket ship and let it carry me on to my next exciting chapter. Like many others I spent much of the next few years isolated from my professional peers and social network, and like many people it shook me to my core.

In the years since, I've taken part-time contracts helping people fix their web servers and building interesting Privacy-enhancing technologies alongside my Concept Operating System . But I've found myself incredibly disillusioned with my industry, an industry intent on learning exactly the wrong lessons from the success and failures of companies that I worked for or was once excited by. Now, everything is a two-sided marketplace with me as the market-maker and middle-man! No, everything is a bespoke digital currency with me as the market-maker and the middle-man! No, everything is an un-licensed bank that sells your transaction data to hedge-funds, and I'm the guy who sells the data! No, everything is a probably-incorrect AI approximation run on someone else's rented computers, with me as the middle-man!

The idea of working for a middle-man or as a middle-manager on computer software for 20 or 30 years more makes me ill, which is distressing since I built my career and formative personal identity around it all; I've been doing this stuff since I was 13 years old! I have to do something about it.

So I don't want to consider myself "a computer professional" for now, let's say I've demoted myself to the computer programmer minor league where I've become semi-professional.

Perhaps all of this is too personal and too open-hearted for the first post in a "company blog", but I think this tone and honesty is an important part of what will make it work. This is not a company, and this is not social media.

This has become an identity crisis for me as many of the people I once worked with look down on me or simply disregard me for choosing to stagnate, while the people I have surrounded myself with online since have looked down on me for being affiliated with those same people I once worked with. It's been upsetting to me how often I can see computer professionals try to clock whether I'm a sex pest or just a "techbro" when I tell them what I've done with my life, and this disillusionment sent me in to a tarpit of soul-searching. Other things happening in my personal life at the same time lead to a period of de-personalization and re-building where my goals and ethics and ethos and character shifted in to a different frame.

In that time I found a lot of the personal growth in spending my free time bike riding to a place where I can quietly sit in the park drinking tea and think about the person I was and the world I was part of.

One of the reasons I moved to Eugene is that a relatively frugal person can live here on a part-time computer engineering contract, allowing for a lot more time to bike to and quietly sit in the park drinking tea. One can even practice Hammock Driven Development in this way.

Some day this tea house may stand on its own, and some day I may go pro again, but until then I'll have to split my time. Part-time knowledge work is hard to come by, but I think can find some folks who "need a devops guy" to be a devops guy for. I have maybe nine more months of runway before I need to find a job or contract, this lets me briefly build momentum on two parts of a life I'd want to be a part of: a long-term sustainable tea business starting with the minimum viable teahouse and a deeper sencha tea practice.

I've day-dreamed about opening a tea house maybe since I first entered the Floating Leaves Tea House when I lived in Ballard, Seattle, Washington. They have a small commercial suite with a beautiful tea service table, tea and teaware covering shelves on the wall, and storage in the back. Previously my experience in tea houses was limited to Asha Tea House across the street from one of my offices in San Francisco, a business which sold fruit tea and boba tea and milk tea in a cafe walkup. They had a small amount of seats, but more importantly they had a loose-leaf brew-bar in the back. You could take the leaves to-go and re-steep them. This business required staff and more resources than I could consider without a robust business plan and probably a bank loan. Floating leaves showed me that one or two people could make a tea house work as a profitable business even in a city like Seattle, even if it still required a business plan and probably a bank loan. These days I drink Oolong and Puerh with Josh at J-Tea, a similar one-room tea-house and sales and import business carefully built over twenty years starting with a wholesale business that regularly sent him across the country with a suitcase full of tea.

In conversation with Josh and others, I've realized that if I want to build a thing that is successful in 20 years that won't turn in to a hustle that saps my joy of the project, I can start today and should move carefully. The Chance Encounter is my first attempt to slowly build a twenty year old business of my own, a possible future outside of computer work. It will be the bare-essentials for the type of experience I want to create, and I'll change it to adapt over time. It will be slow and inefficient and perhaps not even break-even for a long while, but it's something I am truly excited about and nervous to do. I haven't been nervous in years, it's an incredible feeling.

I don't want to just open a Shopify shop and re-sell carefully imported teas, to travel around building a wholesale business. It's fine and honest work, but it feels too impersonal for me and I believe it misses the very point of the teas I want to sell. I want to sit down in front of people and give them the opportunity to have their life changed by sencha tea. Make no mistake: carefully brewing sencha tea changed my life for the better and it can change yours, too.

At some interminable point in those years I lived in San Francisco, I found at a bookstore in Japantown a copy of Baisao: The Old Tea Seller , a collection of translated verse and prose written by a Japanese tea monk who would carry a tea cart around 17th century Kyoto. His poetry was clear and dense, full of Zen allusions I didn't and don't understand along with some wisdom which I had just caught sight of myself. Perhaps more than anything else, that book provided a blueprint for selling tea and the path of mindfulness and zen practice I have been on, and so it's Baisao's sencha ceremony I aim to recreate and pay homage to.

Some day I can decide whether the Chance Encounter is a brick-and-mortar business but for the foreseeable future it will just be two bags that fit on my bike or in my car along with a few gallons of spring water and the open sky. The focus will not be on fulfilling online orders placed by strangers but by meeting people in the wonderful secret natural spaces we are surrounded by, showing them how delicious and eye-opening this tea can be, and giving them the opportunity to take some home and brew it themselves. Inevitably I will offer online sales and shipping and try to establish relationships with cafes and restaurants but it cannot be the focus. If you can get the same tea shipped directly from Japan in a week's time why would you want a middle-man unless you are getting something of great value from that relationship? Now you see the bind I have constructed for myself.

Subscribe for more wordy, toothy rants about:

• My plans for the summer

• Sencha Practice

• How people are confused about umami

• Tea monks and Tea-ism

• Zen and Sencha