welcome home

The word Tejo, or the latin Tagus, is old. Very old. Younger than the pyramids. Older than Portugal. Older than Socrates or Plato or Alexander the Great.

Its roots are cloudy, as the skies under which it flows. The Celtic root means to melt, or to flow. The Indo-European root comes from the word for quiet, or still water. The Ancient Greeks and Romans called it the river of gold, claiming it carried mythical gold dust from the mountains.

It came to symbolize prosperity and abundance, later manifested as ships from foreign lands sailed through its mouth bringing new ideas and riches.

It is where explorers departed, and where adventurers returned home.

Teja is new. Today, along these still waters, it is born. A home for new ideas, for explorers and adventurers and artists and psychonauts and poets and dancers and DJs.

Like the Tejo, its roots are a story.
Like the Tejo, a place where boundaries melt, where ideas exchange, and where those quiet moments are all the sweeter for the entropy by which they are bookended.

Here is a place to dance and gyrate and break bread and share plates. To expound on ideas in fresh substrate. To sit watching still waters, with a coffee or a cocktail, and percolate.

To drink tea with minds free, to eye-open and see and to break forth from the past and experience joy and glee.

To mix with those from near and far, next to where the river melds with the sea.

To alternate between production and work and then to let loose and maybe even to twerk. To gather in masses and take yoga classes to flow with the wind whether madness or mastless whatever your past is this place is your fortress your heart and your fastness within these walls our minds create vastness our kindness and love for each other is casteless with soulfelt compassion and didactic compaction of art and music and stillness and action the nomads find traction, the locals find beauty, you may even meet a cutie patootie, and through this our land, the planned and unplanned, growths into a home; something both modest and grand.

Not doleful but soulful. Not shallow but deep. A place for connections to cherish and keep.

A place to fill with the memories that inspire that last uncontrollable smile that creeps up before sleep.

Pessoa said “O Tejo é mais belo que o rio que corre pela minha aldeia”. The Tejo is more beautiful than the river that runs through my village. But to Pessoa, his village was home. Nothing could be as majestic as the Tejo, but his home would always be more special to him. A message of how our people, our places, the centers of our memories and stories and intimate secrets, is a different kind of beauty, more powerful than even the majesty of millions of years of flowing water and thousands of lore and history.

Teja will never be as grand as Tejo, but today, Teja house begins a journey to being our village. To being a home.

Welcome home.