Hello to the Friends of Venus Sophia Tea Room,

On this lovely sunny afternoon, we all at Venus Sophia send you our greetings!

As I have just updated our mailing list which is growing and growing, I thought I would take this opportunity to send out a few updates from our last Tea Room News.

We are happy to tell you that the music is evolving and simply beautiful at the tea room.  On Sundays, we have Satori Strings with Elizabeth, Catheryn and Zachary, playing violin, viola and cello.  We also have Swing on By with Dick Pollard and fellow musicians, playing saxophone, bass and rhythm guitar.  The new addition is Melody and Elizabeth from SheNanigan playing and singing beautiful harmonious celtic songs on Fridays.  Below is the list of exact dates and times.  Mark your calendars and plan to come for some refreshment and nourishment on many levels.

Friday, July 23, 2-4 p.m., Melody and Elizabeth, Celtic

Sunday, July 25, 2-4 p.m., Satori Strings, Classical

Sunday, July 25, 4-6 p.m., Swing on By, Swing

Sunday, August 1, 2-4 p.m., Satori Strings, Classical

Sunday, August 8, 2-4 p.m., Satori Strings, Classical

Sunday, August 15, 4-6 p.m., Swing on By, Swing

Sunday, August 22, 2-4 p.m., Satori Strings, Classical

Sunday, August 29, 6-4 p.m., Swing on By, Swing

Melody and Elizabeth will also be playing Fridays in August.  Please check our home page at:  www.VenusSophia.com for exact dates.

I believe I mentioned in our last newsletter that we are going to be babysitting a piano from the Conservatory of Music.  It is still coming and when it does, we will be scheduling pianists to also play at the tea room.  We are very much looking forward to offering opportunities to students from the Conservatory to come and play at Venus Sophia.  And we are just downright delighted at this opportunity which will bring a sense of community to the tea room.  More updates about that coming soon!

Summer in the tea room is delightful!  It is light-filled, open and simply lovely.  The fans are twirling overhead circulating the fresh air blown in from the sea…….  The uplifting music, the organic teas and coffees, and artistic menu continue to bring joy to many.  Now that summer has arrived we are also making our very own iced teas.  We also offer matcha, mocha, strawberry and chai latte frappes, as well as all natural fruit smoothies:  mango, peach, banana and raspberry.  They are thirst-quenching and utterly refreshing.  As usual we serve tea all day in our delightful tea pots and tea cups. And the baked goods are a pure delight to gaze upon and consume.  We offer gluten-free options for lunch and for desserts.  We have a few vegan options as well as some raw food options.  The wonderful thing is that everyone can find something at Venus Sophia.

Our boutique is once again filled with Blue Sky Clothing.  We have organic bamboo yoga and leisure wear, so smooth and natural for your skin.  We have delightfully cool summer dresses and jackets, hand-painted tops and lots of summer purses.  And the important news is that we can now order sizing if what you are looking for is missing.  So please stop by, I’m sure you will enjoy the selection with all sizes available.  One last note about the boutique is that we also have very sweet fairy dresses perfect for children and grandchildren….we often have little girls enter the tea room and leave as fairies…..incredibly cute!

If any of you are following us on our website or facebook page (Venus Sophia Tea Room Group Page), you will know that we have had another delightful article written about us in Monday Magazine.  Many, many people have come and enjoyed the piece.  Please check it out if you missed it.  It is in the Canada Day edition, which you can find online.
http://mondaymag.com/articles/category-archive/category/food-and-life/ Check out the article about us called: A Touch of Class

Our Art Galleries continue to delight everyone.  The Forests of Light series has begun to find a home.  We are selling many paintings.  The quality of light in the old growth and rain forests is simply stunning.  Dianne Ostoich, who is the artist, has lowered her prices so that individuals who love her work, can now take them home.  There are many happy art lovers grateful to her.  Havana Angels, in our front gallery, has also captured the imagination of many.  Many an individual has come and sat down to a nice pot of tea gazing and taking in the beauty and imagery of Laurie Baxter’s photography.  We have decided to extend their stay in the galleries due to popular demand.  We hope you will take a moment to stop by, find a moment of entering into the artistry and even consider supporting the artist while treating yourself to a lovely treat from the tea room.

Please keep us in mind when you are in the mood to buy some organic teas for home.  We offer lovely, lovely choices in beautiful red tins and bags complete with beautiful rose labels.  Our teas and tea sales have become quite popular for everyone–and we are happily offering you daily packaged fresh teas.  We are also offering the exquisite Oso Negro organic beans shipped to us fresh after roasting……we are happy to be developing a hardcore following for those beans!

Our final happy announcement is that we are going to be launching our new website in the next few weeks.  I am incredibly excited about it.  I love our current one and I love the imagination to continue creating….so keep your eyes on our webpage and one day you will open it and experience pure joy I’m sure…..

That’s all for now.  Thank you for taking the time to visit with us through our newsletter and we look forward to seeing you soon in Venus Sophia Tea Room….where beauty abounds, love of life radiates and living in wisdom is a way of life…..tea’s on…see you soon….

In peace and friendship,

Jill RoseMary

Venus Sophia Tea Room
540 Fisgard–In the heart of Chinatown
250-590-3953

www.VenusSophia.com
Venus Sophia Facebook Group Page
Find us on Twitter

A place that is prepared for you to enter and be still, or have a moment of reflection, or an opportunity to write or draw or plan a long-overdue conversation with a friend or partner.

Imagine a space that is blossoming in roses and held in sanctuary with ivory tones.

Havana Angels and Forests of Light filling the art galleries.

Beautiful summer garments awaiting for you to be enwrapped.

Soft music to lift your senses and open your heart.

Tea fragrances to fill your soul.  Tea pots to bring beauty to the sharing of tea.

And a living wisdom weaving an etheric thread of belonging in and out of every detail, every gesture, every awareness of life that is essential.

Just imagine a tea room open and light-filled, breezy and fresh, warm and inviting, created and held, so the sharing of tea bears meaning, so the conversations or gazes of interest bear fruit and friendship, so a peacefulness can enter the day, your day, our day….so subtle, yet present, quickening something deep inside so  that a memory, a thread of awareness, a joy emerges bringing to the space more light, more energy, more happiness….

Venus Sophia Tea Room….a place to be and become, an environment to share and be shared, an oasis where the wellsprings of life overflow into tea cups and a peacefulness can grow.

Blue Sky Clothing summer fashions are in the boutique.

Our lovely tea tins are filled and ready for purchase.

Tomorrow, Sunday, is Celtic music from 3 to 5 p.m.

We have organic matcha, mocha and chai frappes.

We serve all natural fruit smoothies.

All our teas are fragrant, full bodied and organic.

All our coffees are fair trade and organic.

We serve tea in lovely teapots with lovely tea cups.

What an interesting word–vessel.  The dictionary defines it as:

A person regarded as a holder or receiver of something, especially something nonmaterial: a vessel of grace.

Venus Sophia Tea Room is just that a vessel, an environment prepared to uphold an intention, prepared to contain and convey it’s namesake Venus Sophia, a vessel of graceful living wisdom, radiating love and inner beauty.  It also has vessels to hold water and warmth, tea and substance.  Venus Sophia is like a heart but with a fifth chamber that opens into the soul life, into an interior place where sanctuary, the wellsprings of life and the essence of light and warmth can be held and perceived within and around.

Venus Sophia is a world of vessels that open into environments.  There are not only tea leaves to be read in tea cups, there are waters of life to enter into, chambers to discover and open, music to hear, light to heal and warmth to embrace and be embraced by.

Venus Sophia Tea Room is full and vast and deep.  It offers tea in the vessel of life.

Venus Sophia Teas are all organic.  We have a wonderful selection of black, black flavoured, green, green flavoured, white, oolong, pu ehr, and herbal teas.  They are packaged in beautiful, reusable red tins complete with a Venus Sophia Organic Tea eye-catching tea label.

Organic Teas maintain a smaller environmental footprint.

How does an organic tea farm operate?

• Abstinence from using any synthetic fertilizer, pesticide or herbicide.
• Environmental protection of lands surrounding the gardens.
• Replenishment and maintenance of garden soil fertility using natural means.
• Promoting and maintaining biodiversity in the gardens and surrounding lands.

We love the teas we have to offer you.  Stop in and see them all on display.  Your senses will dance in delight as you see and smell the tea aromas laid out for your artistic and tea experience pleasure.

Our teas are perfect gifts for friends.  Remember us for wedding favours.  We would be happy to sit down with you and plan your special favours for your special day.

We are open 7 days a week for your retail tea purchases and for you to come, sit down, and have a nice pot of organic tea.

All businesses are not grown out of the premise that there is something to sell and something to gain.  However, a lot of business is connected to making money, giving the public what it wants and always considering the bottom line.  In one aspect of business, this is so.

But there are other ways of growing a business.  There are other starting points and other considerations.

Venus Sophia Tea Room is unique in that the starting premise is to create a living space of beauty held open for the purpose of welcoming others to enter into the tea room.  By entering into something, there is the possibility to perceive environments or remember moments or parts of ourselves often missed or passed over in the racing pace of the day. The exchange of money in this setting, then, is to support the space, the created environment, not just a product or service.

Venus Sophia Tea Room has the unique interest in offering a sanctuary or oasis in one’s day where a calm cup of tea, a meaningful conversation, a sense of wonder or imagination can bubble up from the wellsprings of life to refresh or bring insight to one’s day.

We are not meant to be a fast-paced, service establishment, nor are we offering to make you happy through expectations.  Instead, we are unique in that we prepare an open space for you to enter into where something different transpires….an awareness that substances and essences of that which is living inside of us can be seen outwardly in the beauty and light around us, in the interest we cultivate, in the wisdom that weaves and connects and inspires all of us.  We cultivate the art of accompaniment which, we feel, in some small way can contribute to the culture of peace.

The world is filled with consumerism.  Venus Sophia Tea Room is interested in the arts of compassion, empathy, radiating love, genuine interest, living the wisdom, unfolding the inner beauty, in a place prepared to share with others the understanding that all around us, each and every day, there are challenges beyond our control.  But by entering into the tea room, one can find a moment of repose, a place where imagination can flourish, a lovely conversation that fills one’s heart or brings understanding, music to uplift, tea to enrich, good food to nourish, garments to enwrap, treasures for the soul, and others partaking in the beauty of sharing a moment, sharing a pot of tea, and sharing everyday life together out of a sense of dignity and common purpose.

Welcome into the tea room.

Venus Sophia Tea Room, as many have experienced, is unique.  The nature of it is to open up like a seashell where Venus or inner beauty and radiating love and Sophia, living wisdom, steps forth and appears in this world as a presence.  The tea room then holds open that space where such things can appear, can be seen, can be experienced, but most importantly can live in the world and in each of us.

There are not many environments created to consciously behold and uphold a living beauty, a pulsing love and a living wisdom in quite the way that Venus Sophia Tea Room has set out to do.

There are many tea rituals which do hold such environments where beauty is quietly uplifted and a wisdom is followed or entered into and where love of the cultural partaking of tea is honoured.

The fusion of the tea rituals at Venus Sophia Tea Room means that a created environment has been prepared and opened where all these lovely and delicate, yet living experiences, can live each and every day in the daily rhythm and ritual of not only drinking tea, but of entering into the tea room alone, or with others.

Inside, there is a peacefulness, timeless yet soulful; heartfelt, yet conscious.  There is beauty everywhere, in the details, in the art work, in the colours and light, yet most important is not the specifics, but more the experience of its presence.  People will walk in and say there is a light, or there is an energy or there is a peacefulness….and I would say welcome to the environment of Venus Sophia Tea Room where there is an honouring of the age-old tea rituals that have been brought into a setting where what lives within them can blossom into a new place, devoted to upholding the living presence of that which is vital to life, yet unseen in the material world–radiating love, inner beauty, and a living wisdom that sustains all of life.

Imagine if everyone around the world prepared to sit down and have a cup of tea together, each out of their own culture and ritual, yet fusioned in the common purpose of living together in peace, out of love, surrounded by beauty and compelled by a living wisdom that bears within it the secrets and arts of living a healthful, a soulful and a spirited life.

Venus Sophia Tea Room sends out her invitation.

To be at peace.  To live in peace.  To find peace. To experience peacefulness.

Venus Sophia Tea Room, by nature, is committed to the premise that where there is genuine interest experienced, cultivated and pursued there is the potential for friendship to be discovered and unfolded one lovely layer or petal at a time.  And where there is friendship, peace can be found, full and inviting.

And in that moment of peace-full-ness, there is the possibility to live a new life, to cultivate a new culture full of being at peace, living in peace, finding peace and experiencing peace from the inside out, in the present moment.  Within the inner sanctuary of Venus Sophia Tea Room, the alchemy of refinement can begin to happen as the radiance of an inner beauty, enrobed by the presence of a living wisdom, walks hand in hand in  the pureness of common intention and genuine interest.  For it is here that a radiance as bright as the sun and as pure as the molten sea of gold rays out filling the space with the warmth of friendship and the lightness of joy, and love is born into the world of every day life.

A love that quickens the way we see, the way we hear, the way we act–a substance that turns an ordinary day or moment into an extraordinary one.  An essence that fills our lungs with song and our hearts with compassion.  “Love makes the world go round” isn’t about dizziness or splendour, it is about embodying and living the love in such a way that it moves the world forward in its lovely choreography of orbiting and becoming.

And in the centre of that twirling, an entirely new space in the middle of the vortex opens called life.  And it is within this living environment, like the inside of a seed, or the inside of a universe, yet on Earth,  where the presence of an inner beauty, a living wisdom, a radiating love and a new culture of peace can be born.

Venus Sophia Tea Room holds open that quiet space in the midst of busy life to be able to find a place with others, while drinking tea, to experience the potential of the world in which we live, to experience the alchemy of refinement within ourselves, and to have an opportunity to move it all forward in new and imaginative, inspired and intuitively alive ways…one heartbeat and one breath at a time.

Changing traditional ritual into living presence.

The kettle’s on, come for tea.

Jill,

It was a pleasure to meet and talk with you yesterday. You may remember I visited your beautiful tea room with my mom, Dolly, and took a bunch of wonderful photos. I posted a feature article and review of Venus Sophia on my blog and thought you may like to read it.

http://snackingsquirrel.blogspot.com/2010/05/venus-sophia.html

Thank you for your beautiful energy and enlightening conversation!

Sincerely,
Kelsey Taylor

TODAY WILL BE A WONDERFUL DAY AT THE TEA ROOM.

WE WILL BE HAVING LOTS OF MUSIC!

FROM 1 TO 3 P.M. SATORI STRINGS WILL BE PLAYING CLASSICAL AND CELTIC.  FIND THEIR BIOS BELOW.

AND FROM 4 TO 6 P.M. SWING ON BY WILL BE HERE WITH THEIR SMOOTH TUNES.

LOVELY DAY, LOVELY LUNCHES, LOVELY SOUPS AND SALADS, LOVELY TEA AND TEAPOTS, LOVELY ORGANIC COFFEES, AND MOST OF ALL

LOVELY MOTHERS AND FAMILIES!

PLEASE MEET OUR NEW TEA ROOM MUSICIANS….YOU WILL JUST LOVE THEM!

Catheryn Kennedy – Violin/Viola/Voice

A recent graduate from Western Oregon University, Catheryn has moved to Victoria to teach and further pursue her musical education. Catheryn was the winner of Western Oregon University’s 2008 Concerto competition, a selected soloist for Festival Chorale Oregon’s 2008 European tour, and has since enjoyed playing with local groups such as the Victoria Children’s Choir and with Vinegar Hill. Catheryn is currently an active member of the Victoria Chamber Orchestra; Civic Orchestra; her string ensemble, Satori Strings; and many others.

Elizabeth Jane Fields – Viola/Violin/Voice

Joining the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra at the age of twelve as a violist, Elizabeth spent the next five years being coached by Toronto Symphony members, among them Daniel Blackman, as well as performing under the direction of world-renowned musicians David Zafer,  Sir Andrew Davis and Joaquin Valdepenas. During this time she performed in the Banff International Youth Orchestra Festival, and was presented with the Young Artists Award by the Oakville Symphony Orchestra. After studying classical voice with Norma Burrowes, Elizabeth moved to Victoria B.C. where she now is a member of and performs with Satori Strings, SheNanigan and Vinegar Hill.

Zachary Taylor – Cello/Bass Viol

Zachary Taylor has recently finished studying cello at Western Oregon University. He has been trained in various styles, with a focus on classical and early music. He was the winner of Western’s concerto competition in 2007 with the Saint-Saens concerto in A minor, and has toured Germany with the Oregon Festival Chorale as a chamber musician premiering “Songs of the Earth” by Hal Eastburn in 2008. He has been involved in several ensembles since moving to Victoria, including the Civic Orchestra of Victoria, the Victoria Chamber Orchestra, the Sooke Philharmonic, Vinegar Hill, and is also a member of the Satori Strings Ensemble.