Pun Pun Eco-Village turns 20

A Joyous Ability to Observe, Listen and Adapt.

Pun Pun, the eco-village I have called home for the past ten years recently turned 20. This is a significant milestone for communities like ours. Most “intentional communities”, like all those that dotted the American countercultural landscape during the 1960’s and ‘70’s rarely survived more than a handful of years before dissolving. In the polarized era we now find ourselves in this is even more true. There is an understandable yearning in this hyper individualistic, postmodern world to return to a simpler, community-oriented life. Especially after many of us spent two years in solitary confinement due to COVID-19 protocols. Yet as was discussed in the previous post, community life presents significant challenges, of which few in these curious times carry the mental/spiritual capacity to properly deal with. The unique requirements that arise when forced to coexist intimately with not one or two, but many other messy, opinionated, wonderful and complicated other humans day in, day out are not for the faint of heart. Thus, when push comes to shove, though those who attempt to form eco-villages have, generally speaking, wonderful intentions, good intentions aren’t enough to empower endurance and as such the mission fails.

So how has Pun Pun managed to last 20 years, with little sign of its village collapsing anytime soon? To be sure… I can’t say for sure!! If anyone at Pun Pun is an outsider, naïve to how things work here, it’s me! Being a recovering academic “farang” (foreigner) from Colorado with too many opinions, high ideals, and rather intense emotions that require constant “processing” I am a bit of an anomaly in these parts. Yet after having lived in this place for ten years, having slowly begun to speak the language, grow a taste for extremely spicy foods, truly appreciate and internalize the hypnotic rhythms of Issan and Laos, having married a Thai and with her welcomed a beautiful Thai-American daughter into the world (who already teaches me more about Thailand than I do for her), having spent those strange two years of COVID lockdown here, all those terrifying Trump days here, not surrounded by internet obsessed Christians and Q-Anon conspiracy evangelists but within rice fields, alongside people who get information more from the Soil than from Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson or Zach Bush, offering floating, flowering prayers to water spirits all the while having one foot, as it were, still back in the mad modern realms of American empire with the other foot positioned firmly here, tanned and barefoot, covered in red clay… well, I have, if nothing else, made a few observations.

For starters, Pun Pun is not an intentional community. If anything, Pun Pun is an UN-intentional community. Jon Jondai (P’Jo as we lovingly refer to him as), Pun Puns founder, never intended to create an “eco-village”. Rather, due to a legendary series of events (I highly recommend you watch his now infamous ted talk “Life is Easy” if you haven’t already:)

that included disenchantment from the modern view and wise observations of the masterful simplistic complexity of Nature, mashed in with a healthy dose of Zen Buddhism and inspiration from the elegant adobe sculpting hands of the Taos Pueblo peoples of what is now referred to as New Mexico, he stumbled, nay, sprouted, if you will, into community. When he began building adobe homes here in Chiang Mai 20 years ago on a hillside adjacent the Sri Lanna National Forest, where the land had been all but destroyed entirely by bad modern farming practices, people wondered what the heck he was doing. Buying seemingly useless, barren land and dancing in pits of mud from which he fashioned clay bricks certainly afforded wonder for these villagers, already infected as they were with modernity’s monocropped view. And as they wondered they became genuinely curious. And as their curiosity grew, they approached Jo and watched him from the sidelines as he built beautiful homes from those bricks, surviving on little more than bananas as he patiently planted seeds and transformed dust into nutrient rich soil and helped a forest to grow. It looked fun! So they asked if they could help. Jo said sure! One person came. Then three, then five. They stayed for a few days at a time. They stayed for weeks. Some, stayed for a few years, some for 20.

The modern mind is obstructed with what Buddhists call “wrong view”. I certainly struggle with this, steeped as I am too with linear thinking, indoctrinated as most of us are by classic western educational formulae that incessantly limits our capacity to understand with all its righteous certainties; the arrogant need we have for systems and complex theory, and yes, our inherited colonizer need to control. So, when well-intended westerners (or easterners for that matter, anyone with a western/modern/colonizer education) attempt to build a community, eco-village, etc., they generally do so with the same ego-driven, top-down approach they are seemingly attempting to escape from. Yet alas, escape from modernity we cannot. As Alnoor Ladha brilliantly expresses in his book Post Capitalist Philanthropy and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, in an equally brilliant way suggests too in her profound work Hospicing Modernity, we are all very much steeped in the throngs of capitalism, colonization, civilization, whatever you wish to call it and cannot ideologically pry ourselves out from centuries of its tricky conditioning. As much as we may recognize our growing distaste for the foul pleasures of modernity, most of us secretly kind of like it. We have grown accustomed to it, familiar with its shape, taste and smell. As mentioned in the previous newsletter, our need for space and all the other subtle and not-so subtle privileged comforts of the colonizers brave new world can quickly convince us that civilization isn’t so bad after all, and bam! off we go! back to the hipster district of any given coffee-obsessed corner of Influcerville to continue waxing poetic about how glorious the farmers, ecovillages and indigenous peoples of the world are from a safe distance, ironically abandoning all actual tangible efforts to “reconnect with nature”, “regenerate” and “build community” empowering instead the very systems that kill such things by pursuing not the messy work of coexistence nor the underpaid work of tending to land but rather to reinforcing the usual rat race scramble towards a six figure income nestled conveniently inside alluring technological utopias that grant us our cherished “personal space.” Thus, intentional communities generally fail.

Commitment is hard. Leaving convenience behind is oftentimes unbearable. Being forced to expose our vulnerabilities before others without escape presenting itself as an option is simply unthinkable to most (what Resmaa Menakem would refer to as,) bodies of privilege. The vague enormity of what exists beyond capitalism is humbling, discombobulating, uncertain, disorienting and potentially terrifying. It certainly isn’t comfortable, at least not by any modern orientation and rarely will it offer a decent income. “Rewilding” can’t be done from behind a screen and is, by definition, uncontrollable.

Nature is far grander and complicated than most can begin to image. Ecovillages, standing as they are at the intersection between plants and people, modernity and ancient future, form and the formless, etc. must surrender to Her uncertainty, Chaos and Chance. This is not easy for the civilized mind which demands control, structure, a clearly defined set of rules, instruction and answers to questions such as Why? and How?. Civilized minds need an orderly plan. Yet, as opposed to the approaches taken by those influenced by western educational methods and view, instead of compartmentalizing “subjects”, “problems”, etc., attempting to organize that which cannot be organized, I have witnessed since living amongst Thai villagers that here most everything is viewed (usually by default, not in some overly aggrandized way) as interconnected and when “making a plan” whether it be for building and/or maintaining a so called “eco-village” or addressing trauma, or learning a new language, raising children communally, etc. you don’t dissect “it” systematically or over-psychologize anything or suck the life out of a fun new endeavor by over rationalizing, over thinking, etc. You simply, as my mentor Martin Prechtel puts it, “…start in the middle and go everywhere at once.”

This is how Pun Pun started. This is how it managed to survive for 20 years and will likely survive another 20 unless my community members start thinking like me and try to construct too many systems and formulate colorful graphs to explain how to do what we do so others can replicate it.

Pun Pun can’t be recreated. It isn’t a corporation. People can however be inspired by what we do here and adapt what they are inspired by to their own Place, with all the curious and wonderful needs of all their local relations in mind. As anyone who has, frustratingly, returned proudly from, for example, a Permaculture Design Course in Maui to their riverside cabin in say, Colorado, with certificate in hand, ready to apply their newly found skills only to learn after a failed couple of seasons that what was learned at the festival workshop didn’t work out so well back home can attest to, Nature is, naturally, wild, and unpredictable. Ecovillages, like people, like Land are unique, and moody. For such beings to grow, relationships must be made, tended to in ways as diverse as the people and plants within them. This is not to say there isn’t much to be gained from learning from such helpful methods as permaculture. Please, do yourself a favor and take a PDC right away! This is important! But like a Jazz musician who studies theory for years only to abandon all of it once they finally are ready to become a real musician, please understand, as Master Yoda once told a certain Jedi Knight, “Knowledge does not wisdom make.” And little of what wisdom requires can be planned. Something else thus must be tended to. Something beyond the cultivation of a certain skill set or ideological view. Something more akin to surrender, constancy and a joyous ability to observe, listen and adapt.

It would be wrong of me to suggest any of this is easy. Ironic, I know, as P’ Jo famously says frequently, “Life is easy, why do we make it so hard???”. Yet I think brother Jo is not referring to the convenience-obsessed modern mind when he says this, certainly not the mind directing its person to make a buck without any effort, to drive through a fast-food restaurant and quickly get dinner without taking the time to harvest the vegetables, slaughter the lamb, cut them, flay them, cook them, thank them, etc. Nooo, life isn’t easy like that. But certainly, more fun and stress free should we learn to stop thinking so much, wasting so much time as we often do making plans, trying to grow our business, posting on social media incessantly about building that epic new Healing Retreat Center in Anywhere But Where I Am Nowville. Na, Life is easy if we let Life itself call the shots, bowing in Awe before Her brilliant unpredictability. When we throw out the script and engage authentically, spontaneously, with courage and curiosity in the circle dance of which we admittedly do not know the right moves to, from which, in trying beautifully, we gain access into The Process, and join thus with other curious souls doing the same, and so too, we join finally with all of life. When we commit to doing just that which is in front of us, however unglamorous, underpaid and unseen it may be, tending fully to that which truly needs us now, not worrying about the next thing until it shows up, unintentionally, things tend to evolve, naturally, organically, like Pun Pun. It’s ok to not totally know what you are doing. None of us really do. But we gotta try. Together. The unborn are counting on us.

Dedicated to my dear friend, neighbor, mentor and beloved teacher, Jon Jondai who continues to inspire countless beings the world over with his enormous heart and contagious love for living.