This week on Talking Tea we chat with Morgan Beard of Urasenke Philadelphia, an organization dedicated to practicing and teaching the Japanese way of tea. We recorded our podcast inside the amazing Japanese galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which include a complete tea house and garden as well as centuries-old tea utensils and masterpieces of Japanese art.

Morgan talks with us about some of the objects in the galleries (including the tea bowl shown here), and about how Japanese traditions of tea and aesthetics come together in the spirituality of the Way of Tea.

For information on Urasenke Philadelphia's classes and events, go to its website at www.phillytea.org.

More on the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Japanese collections and its extraordinary upcoming show on the art of the Kano period is at the Museum's website, www.philamuseum.org.

Info about tea events at Shofuso, the Japanese House and Garden in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, is at www.japanesehouse.org

For more information on Talking Tea and updates on new episodes, visit our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/talkingtea.

To inquire about being a guest or having your organization featured, please email us at [email protected].

Talking Tea is produced and hosted by Ken Cohen. You can follow Ken on Twitter @KensvoiceKen.

This podcast features music from "Japanese Flowers" (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii/japanese-flowers) by mpgiiiBEATS (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii) available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Adapted from original.

Tea bowl photo courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art.