a few words about me
Hi there! As an interplanetary spacecraft engineer and practitioner of the Japanese Way of Tea, I've naturally been drawn to intersections of astronomy/space exploration and chanoyu. Over the years as I've found and played with these intersections, I've collected enough to inspire me to make a place to consolidate, share, and discuss them. That's what this blog is about.
I've always loved space, and I'm lucky enough to work on interplanetary spacecraft as a flight software engineer and a mission operations engineer. My first experience with this was as an instrument flight software engineer for MESSENGER, followed by a stint writing software that runs on New Horizons' Command and Data Handling processor. I've been on the mission operations team running New Horizons since 2008, and now I'm also writing instrument flight software for the Europa Clipper mission.
My discovery of the Way of Tea was more happenstance. I heard about a local Urasenke tea school in an introductory Japanese language class some fifteen years ago, looked into it, signed up for lessons without really knowing what I was getting into, and just never stopped. What kept me at it? Besides its connection to the natural world both in terms of seasonality and the use of natural materials thoughtfully crafted and arranged, its cultivation of fellowship between people is central to my practice of the Way of Tea. I spent a year in Kyoto studying the Way of Tea full-time in a program for non-Japanese practitioners, deepening my understanding and appreciation of this syncretic centuries-old art and making life-long friends from around the world.
Why is this blog called 星座のお茶会 Seiza no Ochakai? It's from the opening song of the anime series Azumanga Daioh, and since it's a playful, made-up turn of phrase, it's difficult to translate, but it's something like "chakai in the constellations" or "the constellations' chakai," where chakai is a word we use to refer to a short, casual, fairly public tea gathering. There's no further reference to it in the series or—as far as I can tell—anywhere else.
(As an admitted pedant, I try to avoid using the oft-seen translations of chado and chanoyu as 'tea ceremony' and of chakai as 'tea party.')
