This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Can I just read this? She's so beautiful. I almost cursed it so beautiful. Can you say it again? She's writing from when to when. Okay, so she's writing. So it says, Exhibit E, Letter from Alexis After Capitalism to Alexis During Capitalism. Retrieved from email residue algorithm. Received in inbox, alexispalmine at gmail.com on 9-13-10. So September 13, 2010. Dear Letsy, breathe deep, baby girl, we won.

[01:04]

Now life, though not exactly easier, is life all the time. Which, that line alone. Not chopped down into billable minutes, not narrowed into excuses to hurt and forget each other. I'm writing to you from the future to remind you to act on your belief, to live your life as a tribute to our victory and not as a stifling reaction to the past. I am here with so many people that you love and their children, and we are eating together, and we are tired from full days of working and loving, but never too tired to remember where we come from, never exhausted past passion and writing. So I'm writing you now. Here in the future, we have no money. We have only the resources that we in our capitalist phase did not plunder to work with, but we have no scarcity. You can reassure Julia, we have plenty of technology.

[02:07]

Technology is the brilliance of making something out of anything, of making what we need out of what we had, of aligning our spirits so everyone is on point so much of the time that when one of us falls off, gets scared or caught up, the harmony of yes, yes, yes, we are priceless. brings them right back into tune with where they need to be. We have the world we deserve, and we acknowledge every day that we make it what it is. Everybody eats. Everybody knows how to grow agriculturally, spiritually, physically, and intellectually. No one owns anything or anybody or even uses anything like a tool. Each everything is an opportunity, and we are artists singing it into being with faith, compassion, confusion, breakthroughs, and support. It is on everyone's mind and heart how to best support the genius that surrounds us all, how to shepherd each of us into the brilliance we come from, even though our experience breaking each other apart through capitalism has left much feeling to be done.

[03:21]

We are more patient than we have ever been. And now that our time is divine and connected with everything, we have developed skills for how to recenter ourselves. We walk, we drink tea. We are still when we need to be. No one is impatient with someone else's stillness. No one feels guilty for sitting still. Everybody is always learning how to grow. So that's part of it. Which I was like, Doma! Yay! have such reverence for just feeling what is possible and then hearing those words here at Tassajara where so much of that exists I think

[05:30]

I don't know if you feel like you're not an activist because you're semi-cloistered from the rest of the world. This is the world that people are dreaming of. And as a community, how can we continue to work towards getting it closer and closer to that vision. Yeah. So one thing that I feel is really important is to be meticulous with my actions and be an example. And that includes my behavior as well as encouraging different aspects of this community to be as meticulous with their relationship with the world as a whole.

[06:35]

So for an example of last year, I really encouraged Michael Batonzo to get in touch with local farmers markets and to buy organic produce, which I noticed last year didn't have as much. And so I'm not sure what happened. I didn't really follow up with that, but that's kind of these small little actions. And one thing that's been on my mind is how our paper products and whether they're post-consumer based. And these little actions of buying things, you know, our money and how we encourage corporations to go towards things that we say, hey, this is what we want. You know, we want organic, we want environmentally safe, we want these things that don't have an impact on our earth. And this is kind of our most powerful options. I think this is a really interesting discussion that you guys are bringing here.

[07:40]

I think it's interesting because, I mean, like Helena just pointed out, we're not an island. But at the same time, you have a whole bunch of people who have purposely, to some extent, distanced themselves to from the systems of society on an island, obviously, but, um, so it's an interesting thing. I think, um, I think it's an important thing for folks such as that to, um, you know, to hear each other remembered. It's an interesting situation, you know. I think, like, we were To me, it's like, we were kind of feeling you all out. We're like, are people going to be into this at all? Is anyone going to show up?

[08:43]

And maybe you all were feeling us out too. But it's been, to me, I mean, we've had so many thoughtful conversations with people who really care and really think about these things and are just... is here, even if it's not on the surface all the time. Dawn, I think you mentioned it, but I was struck by even thinking about a community like this as a way for people to learn how to bring that out in the world from a sense of engagement in issues like this. and the important role that a place like this, which isn't engaged in, which on the surface wouldn't be engaged in direct action with these other issues on the world, with it being cloistered, not separate, but that it supports them.

[09:59]

And then, I don't know, I appreciated your comment and sort of thinking about the karma of supplying the men in those actions with the paper products, but also about everything that we buy or wear, how much we buy or wear, how much we buy, all of these different things in a way that it ripples out and sending signals to the market, not that much to produce, but that's affecting. several steps down the far upstream. Great. If you can pick Mount Holland's communities, they've maybe now all switched to vegan food. I think there was some conversation about the contribution of farm, I don't want to say husbandry, that's a very old-fashioned word. Farm animals to climate change and

[11:01]

actually in agriculture, raising animals is one of the biggest contributors to kind of carbon emissions. So I think that, yeah, these Buddhist communities that have land or that have communities operating are thinking about how to use solar and how to use food and products that reflect their values and how they want to be in the world, which to me, like, Part of what excites me about that is, in some ways, this renunciation practice that I first encountered doing retreat practice in Dharma. Because, of course, as we know, renunciation isn't really about deprivation or self-punishment as much as it's about freedom and starting to learn that we don't actually need all these material comforts that we might think that we need. And, of course, There's also important things to say about renunciation while also maintaining accessibility so that people can actually be in community together and show up.

[12:06]

But yeah, it really has me thinking about trying to bring that conversation and practice to a larger audience that's maybe not familiar with meditation retreat, but what is enough for us to live on and be happy? what is enough for us to live in the United States, which is like a huge consumer of energy and way more in proportion to our population than other parts of the world. So what does sustainability and enough really look like in a lived experience? And I think that's an amazing experience to get to have at this place. Yeah. I actually think it's much, much, much, much less currently think we need. Would you say that even at Tassajara? No. You're close to the... No, I think we could probably get by with less than Tassajara. Definitely. Yeah. Just so I thought about general society rather than Tassajara.

[13:08]

I mean, absolutely. So I think it's, yeah, it's maybe not so much about like, okay, how can we do these, like, how can we utilize technology, green technology, alternative technologies, alternative systems to get what we want? Not that, but instead, how can we really look at ourselves and at our communities to lessen what we think we need in the first place? And so, I mean, that would be maybe more applicable to society at large, but even Tassajara, I mean, we have a lot of... Yeah, I don't know. We have a lot of nice things here. We have, like, yeah. I really don't know where the line would be, but yeah, I think Hasahara could probably get by on less. Yeah, there are communities that get by on a lot less.

[14:10]

Like, there are Taravon monastic communities that get by on a lot less, as you probably were. Yeah. So, kind of connected to that, I'm never sure how much to emphasize personal change as the origin of societal change, like looking in yourself to look at your own greed and illusion, and then materially look at what do I consume, how do I consume, where is it from, as personal practice, Yeah, I'm never sure how to... I think it's interesting to think about it on Sapphire because you can't actually make that choice by yourself here about how much you're going to consume. In terms of how much food you buy, that's a collective decision.

[15:11]

Or maybe one person sort of making it, but it's based on what are the collective needs. Or if you want to buy something, get the track to figure out how to get it. So it's, in some ways, thinking about it here, it's like, how does even the question of trying to think about our own grief, hate, and delusion, and our own accumulation of stuff for ourselves, like, should we all be thinking about it, not just at the individual level, but families and communities, and like, what do we all need together to feel sustainable? Because I think that it can be easy I mean the sort of you know I think the thing to do in the Bay Area these days to be more ecologically friendly is to buy a Prius as a car to get around it and you're like okay wait a minute like I get to feel like oh I'm being all ecologically friendly by buying and it's hybrid and it's fuel efficient and it's like oh but like we need to be thinking about it on a different level of

[16:18]

How do we figure out how we all get around in a more fuel-efficient and less car-based way? So that is, should I be spending more of my energy and time on the public transit systems or figuring out how to work closer to where I live or all of these kinds of things rather than just like, okay, I bought my Prius and now I can drive around wherever and feel good and energy efficient. So... Go on to the talk about the sort of personal energy decisions rippling out even thinking about sort of how that on an individual level becoming collective driving the demand for energy And how that plays out in domestic politics, international politics, with this level of comfort that we deem as what we need.

[17:31]

And how that plays out with the effect on the environment. We're always searching for new energy sources. Politics with who governments support and don't support in the Middle East in relation to the need for oil, things like that. And then also when, just something that came to mind in talking about the, you mentioned animal husbandry in that sense of the environmental impact, but also to think about the treatment of animals on factory farms really being a hellworm of experience when those going through it yeah and I mean I think part of our like 50 year effort is to also see how

[18:46]

how are these many different issues and angles interwoven, and how can we support each other? I think it's very easy to get into a silo mentality, like, this is my issue, I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it well. We're not really connecting and networking across different issues. But even with the animal rights kind of area, I think about the really severe state repression that has come down on different animal rights groups that have taken more direct action tactics of freeing animals from test laboratories and stuff like that. And some of the, I mean, they basically like labeled a lot of groups, eco-terrorist groups for doing property damage or theft of property from animals. environmental reasons. Not to defend all of those groups as perfect, because they definitely weren't, but just to say that's an area where state repression and people who are looking at the militarization and surveillance of all kinds of political groups is really interconnected with people who care about animal rights and environmental issues also.

[20:03]

Just to ask, where were those happening? Was it in the U.S. or was it... It was mostly in the Pacific Northwest, I think. Animal Liberation Fund and Environmental Liberation Fund. I have a question that's back to number two, spiritual knowledge, not a substitute for political education. I have two parts of me that are kind of existing. One is the... well, along with this, it'd be so great if there was, you know, Zen Center started to think of it as a, itself as a school, and, you know, if there was some kind of more, more classes like this, and more reading materials, and, you know, even just papers from, you know, that were different than the New York Times, so we were, because when will schools change to be teaching this? We don't know, but we can start including some studying, and, uh,

[21:03]

But from the other direction, what I've been thinking a lot about recently is education and thinking is not a substitute for spiritual knowledge. In other audiences, that would be flipped. Yeah, true. I've gone deeply into this practice, and I was talking to someone, a teacher, who... He's very well educated, also a deep practice. And I actually thought he would be more encouraging of my interest in engaged Buddhism. He said, let go of your ideas of the world. And he said, without a shift of consciousness, there's no hope. And I think that is a little bit of a different... a little bit of a different angle than focusing on systems, not individuals.

[22:11]

But that really, like, went into me, and I'm still kind of processing the implications of that. Anyway, I just wanted to share that. Yeah, that's very real. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, when Buddhist Peace Fellowship started, 35 plus years ago, folks wanted to have an organization because, or a place to network with other folks who were interested in looking at the systemic level and interested in political education as well as spiritual education because it wasn't what they were getting from their Dharma teachers or their lineages. And so I feel grateful because now I feel like I have a lineage to lean on. You know, there's been some Geek Sharma practitioners who've been thinking and studying about necklace intersection for a number of years. But it just, yeah, it makes me reflect on, in some ways, how radical it was to even come together at that time.

[23:21]

To, yeah, to be thinking about that. And, you know, it was books like Robert Aitken Roshi, Joanna Macy, Jack Kornfield, Norman Fisher, you know, from many multiple lineages who were really coming together to say, we want to see how these things fit together or where they're difficult to fit together. You know, they're just places where it's like, yeah, this doesn't quite match up and let's explore that. that difficulty as well. So I think we should study more here, because I think to make that exploration conscious and, you know, is worth it. I'm in favor of that. Encourage your teachers to, you know, whether it's us or, like, we were like, give me a reading list to send around for folks who are interested in exploring more together or, you know, on your own, I think, can be

[24:22]

Really helpful. I'm noticing folks are... And I know that it's bad time. So we should maybe close. We're interested in continuing the conversation. So I appreciate everyone's time and attention. I know we already put it. Yours as well. So that's thank you, thank you. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[25:11]

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