Zen and The Moon, The virtue of the Tao's Herb, Bowl Person....

Zen and The Moon, The virtue of the Tao's Herb, Bowl Person....

Talks and writings of Augusto Alcalde...

http://sweepingzen.com/?s=augusto+alcalde

Cheers!!!

Zen, the fly, The Internal Martial Arts....

Zen, the fly, The Internal Martial Arts....




Movement, change of vision, New Subjectivity, New Sociability...

Cheers!!!

On the death of my dear Old Teacher, Friend, Companion Robert Aitken Roshi

On the death of my dear Old Teacher, Friend, Companion,

Robert Aitken Roshi

What from an Old Buddha dies, is not the Old Buddha...

Heard Roshi died, and i send a heartfelt Hug and gassho to you friends.

And i write to him from my heart full of gratitude

Dear Roshi:

I remember the 40th anniversary of the Diamond Sangha, when i was there.

I remember it with good and deep memories of the place, the group, the Aina and your presence and teaching and interaction in the Dokusan room for so many years.

And i want to express my gratitude to you for that and your help in so many ways during those years that i appreciate and cherish so much, and have left so many teachings and memories in my heart and my walking. Deep thanks.

No doubt what you started as the Diamond Sangha will echo in time forever, and i hope will be a good seed for the new horizon that is so badly needed these days in this wounded earth.

I remember Koko An and Manoa Valley, as well as Palolo and the times we shared together. I remember, and feel grateful to life for them.

And i remember you quoting:

"A monk asked Ta-lung, "What is the 'minutely subtle?'"

Ta-lung said, "The breeze brings the voice of the water close to my pillow;
the moon carries the shadow of the mountain near to my couch."

And indeed this breeze here in distant Cordoba City brings the voice of the gecko, of the bells, and the smell of the Dojo so close that seems the ocean is right here in the backyard.

I also remember you saying:

Ta-lung said, "The mountain flowers bloom like brocade;
/ the river between the hills is blue as indigo."

I do not know about the mountain flowers blooming, neither i do about the river between the hills, i have so much to walk and lean that maybe for the 100th anniversary i will be able to say i know something.

But i do know in my heart the meaning and importance in my life and walking of your presence and the Diamond Sangha in those days we walked together the Dharma Aina.

I offer heartfelt and deep mahalo nui loa, respect, gratitude and love to you for all this.

Aloha O'e

A hui hou kakou

Nine bows.

Augusto Alcalde

Because.....

Some know Augusto as a teacher of Zen from Argentina, some know him as herbalist, acupuncturist, Reggae and blues musician,… oh hell, how do I write an into to this? I just tip my glass of red wine to the blue horizon..

Doug Matsuoka

DougWords of Vanity

Date: Friday, March 22, 2002 5:35 AM

From: Augusto

To: DougWords of Vanity

Sailors!! Greetings from Aina Latino... Sharin' dis with u....

One Heart! Augusto

------------------------------------------------
Letter to a friend from Australia…

Dear Friend:

> Dear Augusto It seems like there has been some interference...Things seems to
> get edited out of my messages. I have been involved with the local anarchist
> community here and we have been harassed by the police all the time. I
> decided that it was not worth it and I have severed ties with sensitive groups
> as well as people who do not assist my position because of their profile. I'd
> like us to be friends though. I am deeply concerned about you as I have seen
> what happens to people here who are involved in political activities. During
> the 60's my friend was involved with Parents Without Partners and you should
> have seen what the media did to her...also when her friend tried to get a job
> through ASIO...they knew everything about her...we think we live in a free
> country...you've got to be kidding... although I'm not getting involved with
> anything subversive anymore Why do you still do it Augusto?
>

Because of 30000 brothers and sisters that were killed and tortured, because of the kids that were appropriated and their identity erased, because i was able to escape at the brink, because my love and partner is alive because she was late to a meeting and they did not take her, because i have two daughters that need a horizon, and because i can look into their eyes and answer any question they have about those years without feeling ashamed, but dign, because there is poverty, because 70 kids die every day because of the power's greed and ignorance, because there is a march in the whole country today and next sunday to remember and repudiate the day the military did came into power with blood and greed, and tried to murder the horizon and kill the Red Queen, because there is sunlight coming through my window, because my partner's kid needs medicines, as many other kids do, and they (we) cannot pay for them, and the power is letting them (we) die just because they are poor, or sons and daughters of workers, or brown, or black, or kids, or young, or old, or white, or.....to sum up, because they are different, as my down syndrome daughter is, and there is no place for the different, the undigestible, the other, in the gray and sterile world that the Power wants, making the Blue Planet flat (in their minds..) not wanting to shake fear and ignorance and to allow a rainbow to dance, making a new world in which many worlds can abide in freedom, justice and democracy, because of me, because of you, because of all the ones that i do not know but are brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and grandmothers and
grandfathers, because of the ancient ones, because of the ones not yet born, because of the mistery, because of the dance, because of this heartbeat, because my heart and yours is at the left, because the blood is wonderfully red, because of the One Love, because of the One Heart, because of my love, because of you, but really, because clouds fly and sun warms and tobacco burns and rabbits have no horns and cats do not bark, this is, because of no-choice. Because of the Enough, because of the Never More, Never Again.
Because of the smile and because of the laughter and the hug. No-choice.
That is the shape of my heart. The mistery and the horizon and the dance are pregnant there. And because a few days ago, my younger daughter phone me late at night, concerned about rumors of military plans to come back into power, concerned about my destiny, her destiny, our one destiny, and the destiny of all he us that share the heart and the dance and the horizon. And because of the poem i wrote after hearing her.

In this night

never as any other

the end of the day gin

threshold of the poem and the dream

the memory of what comes

i would say ex-plores but no

in-plores the leafy flight

sowing genealogies.

A late phone call,

a voice of arrow

like root shot toward the mistery,

touching the breadth of death

inquires the horizon.

Will the beast came with the same face?

The past as nightmare of the tomorrow?

as a crow perched on the frame

of a door looking out to madness?

What can i do but laugh,

hug you in the distance and the cheer

this moment is already very old

and its pregnancy more ancient than the beast

the question is of gold

like the certainty and that wine

and that intense sea

with no reason nor why is danced

this is, lives, survives, heart

that longs as horizon

red of life and path and step

in the crack of unpredictable tides.

> Why not be benevolent and strong yet protective of those weaker than you
> without putting yourself at risk...?
>

As a weak one, i try to do this. .. You do not put yourself at risk, in this case... It is the Greed, Ignorance and Fear of the Power as always that puts you at risk but this risk is no bigger than the mysterious certain possibility of not being here next moment or what is more awesome, the possibility of being here and honoring this here with the dance...

Augusto

Zapatismo and the Everliving Circle

Talk given in
Melbourne, Australia

Zapatismo and the Everliving Circle

I want to thank everyone of you for your presence here, to the Trades Hall people for offering the place, and to the Melbourne Buddhist Peace Fellowship people for coordinating this meeting.
Thank you very much for your sincere solidarity.

First of all I want to say that of course I do not represent the Zapatista movement, nor do I represent the Zapatista Front. No one does...

I am just nobody, coming from the heart and nowhere, just trying to share issues that i feel of vital importance for this Blue Planet and for us and the many beings, walking, flying, sitting or swimming its grounds.

We will watch the film on the March of the Dignity of the Zapatista movement, and then we can have some discussion and sharing between all of us, in a horizontal way.

So, let me say something, to set the ball rolling.....

A good introduction are the following words from Subcomandante Marcos, on Zapatismo.
A good ground for this sharing too.

He said elswhere:

"It is a need to build a new political culture.
This new political culture can arise from a new way of seeing the Power.
It is not a matter of taking Power, but one of revolutionizing its relationship with the ones who exert it, and with the ones who suffer it.
The Zapatismo is not a new political ideology or a refrying of old ideologies.
The Zapatismo does not exists.
It only serves, as the bridges serve, to cross from one side to the other.
Thus, in the Zapatismo all are contained, all the ones that want
to cross from one side to the other.
Each one has her/his one side and other side.
There are no prescriptions, lines, strategies, tactics,
laws, rules or universal watchword.
There is only one aspiration: to build a better world, that is to say, a new one.
To summarize: the Zapatismo is of no one's, and thus, it is of all and everyone."

So here, in resonance with brother Marcos, i'll try to convey how the bridge is shining, as i see it, and walk together with all of you through it, the walking, as the bridge itself.

I see this movement not really as a movement, but rather as composed of many, many different and at the same time similar movements.
It is a movement of movements.

The Zapatismo planted the seeds for a new way of conceiving politics and political action, that includes poetry and the willingness and disposition to dance according with the circumstances, and resonating with the true, real need of all and everyone.

The Zapatismo then is not enclosed in any doctrine or dogma, as Marcos makes very clear in the quoted text.
It is based on a new attitude in the political world, a new attitude in life and in walking, truly new because it is the old root, the tradition of dignity and struggle that says that

"the flower of the word will not die. The occult face of the one who names her today may die, but the word that came from the bottom of the history and the earth, cannot now be rooted out by the power's haughtiness"....

Two things, i believe, do direct and inspire the whole movement, and they are new attitudes, based and rooted in the Ancient Heart.

The first is the motto “Asking questions as we walk” and the second is “to command by obeying”.

The Movement is walking in this way and rythm the Word, the word that walks truths, and the first history, the most distant, the most profound, the most true, the daughters and sisters of the Primal History.

The indigenous brothers and sistahs from Chiapas, with teir Word and dance do affirm the matter of a radical ethics of personal responsibility.
Choosing to listen, to embody and present the cry, and to walk it "for a world in which many worlds can abide".

And i believe that the only way of walking tis is to walk struggle and dance with the heart of "all for everyone, nothing for us".

So, Zapatismo as a crack in globalisation and oppression, is an unconditioned spark of rebel dignity, aliveness, humour, creation, faith, and passion, and those sparks turn themselves into actions and visions that give a name to our name.

The Movement of Movements do confront the law of oppression and marginalisation with a different logic of legality and legitimacy, a vital one, a life affirming one, to move out and away of the dialectic of Power, and to answer, as life does, in the most unexpected way.

The question is clearly then not to take power, but to exert it.

To make clear the real need for social transformation, but without prescribing the way, not wanting or pursuing leadership or "vanguardship", neither affirming to possess the absolute truth or a clear map of territory.

Dancing thus on uncharted ground.

Thus, living without denying or pushing away death, the struggle is the dance of living in intimacy with the mystery and the enigma.

The Zapatista utopia is related with making a new world, and has to do with an ethic of desire, need, dreams and the impossible.

Here the ideals are not the goal, they just open the walking and the way.

This Movement of Movements, I believe, does not promise total joy and liberation, but to bring forth beauty, to make something creative and healing with the symptom, to go through death, pain, hopelessness and domination with acts that change our position in front of life, deeply inmersed with vital responsibility in the play of mirrors and crystals, as Marcos says:

"Cut from the inverse side, a mirror ceases to be a mirror and becames a crystal. Mirrors are for looking on this side, and crystal is made to look to the other side. Mirrors are made to be etched.
A crystal is made to be broken......to cross to the other side...."

Marcos and the Zapatista community leaders then do not occupy the place of the ideal, but they place themselves as subjects that encourage and trigger the action in others.

They jump, and invite us to do it too, away from power and knowledge and the predictable, in the same act of questioning it, pointing to its unsubstantial evanescent and inconsistent nature.

The compañeros and compañeras clearly show that power is not omnipotent, that the defeat is a lie designed to sink us as vital rebels into the lifeless desert of hopelessness.

That the "Great Other" and the order that language crystallises is fractured and fragmented, and that this is its true nature and weakness.

And seeing this, it is also our opportunity to walk and re-create the "Land Without Evil" that our Ancestors were talking about, at every one of our together breathing and walking in intimate resonance.

This Movemente does make the knot and the problem clearly and vividly evident, and then it retires, giving and allowing space, encouragement and heart to the community, the organization and action of the other, that is to say us, so that us, and they as us and us as them, can settle in the heart of the common responsibility of our life: Freedom, Justice True Democracy and Dignity, the first of all words and of all tongues, of the true tongue that was born from the mirrors, as Old Man Antonio conveys to Marcos in the early days of sharing the jungle

They place themselves momentarily, in and as an empty space, one that is full of potential, an empty (but not void) place that could be occupied by anyone that shares the same heart, walking and word.

The proposal is then, it seems to me, to carry on the vital and just need, the vital and just desire and hope of living a new world to the ultimate, deep consecuences and horizons.
To create at every single moment of everyday life, the style, tone and rythm of our practices, dances struggles and steps, going beyond the commands imposed by the Power (and the deadly danger of internalizing them...), in its many faces...

And thus building and bridgeing from an ancient ethical and poetical position ever new grounds of resistance, of rebelry, of creation, of dignity in action.

This is the replacing of the idea of victimization of the people in front of the power by the great recovering and uncovering of the collective memory and identity, the strengthening of the social and communal bonds, and the re-creation of the World, expressing, walking and embodying of the Myths, symbols, meanings and sense that sustains the heart and beat of the struggle.

We then can sing and walk the Word that says that we have to learn to walk again at each step, looking again freshly to the world, thus, "asking questions, we walk".

We have to look at the world by walking.
And because that looking and that walking has to be new, we ask questions, living as the question herself, and we listen.

And that listening does dance and struggle and brings forth a new world, one that we and the many generations to came (and not only humans), need and long for.

Brother Tacho, says, “To make Revolution is like going to a school that has not yet been built.”

Thus this heart has been walked, built and bridged by the inclusion of the other, the different, the marginal, by the heart and vision of, ‘Behind us, we are you.’

They have vividly shown that it is possible (and a need) to do politics in a completely new way; where the ethics are more crucial than calculation, strategy and manipulation, where the ends does not justify the means (by any means), where giving word and shout to the truth is more radically subversive than shooting a gun, where inclusion is more crucial than doctrine and success, gathering together all kinds of walkers whose heart is dignity and are rebels by nature.

Thus the Zapatismo shows in its word and walking that the community has the primal role.
That community is the primal role.

That history (the true one, not the one told by the "historical winners") has much more to do with the creating of a dign future right now from this very present, than to curse or ignore the past or to resign ourselves to the actual reality, internalizing the lie of the Power that says that there is no other way or alternative.

"Asking questions we walk", we say, bringing forth that radical heart that can imagine, create and walk fresh and new alternatives.
Unknown alternatives, pregnant ones.
A heart that eludes the confrontation that is directed to an immutable, fixated, certain and undoubted goal, because that goal is fixated by a certainty.

And there are no certainties in this word, this dignity and this walking, but steps in which un-certainty and creativity are sisters, and mystery and potential are brothers and sisters.
They truly are the two wings of the birds of freedom.

This Movement has already showed with deep radicality that the word is also an act.

Words more powerful than bullets, that are not only sounds but also a powerful silence, "unthinkable tenderness" the broom and the brush to clean and to paint the new world at each step, as each step itself, as ourselves.

This walking and building of the new heart-walk-world is actualized when those words are the primal heart, and are embodied in the walking, the many colours welcomed not just as equal, but also as different .

Marcos conveys, “We say, I am as I am, and you are as you are, let’s build a world where I can be, and not have to cease being me, where you can be and not have to cease being you. And where neither I nor you will force another to be like either me or you.”

And to begin ending this talk, let me quote once more brother Marcos when he says:

"Zapatismo is not an ideology, it is not a bought and paid for doctrine.
It is....an intuition.
Something so open and so flexible that it really occurs in all places,
Zapatismo poses the question: 'what is that has excluded me?'.
'What is that has isolated me?'......
in each place the response is different.
Zapatismo simply states the question and affirms and knows
that the response is plural, that the response is inclusive......"

I hope to have awakened the inquiring-walking, to have opened that intuition that occurrs in all places, and if so, lets together walk the plural, inclusive response.....

I hope this talk serves as an opening into the rainbow of the Zapatismo.
Let us see the word and the dignity walk… we can talk, and i hope, walk.

"Old Man Antonio used to say that the struggle is like a circle.
It can begin in any point, but it never ends,"

So welcome!
Welcome to the everliving circle.
Cheers!!!


Augusto Al Q'adi Alcalde

www.solidaridadesrebeldes.kolgados.com.ar