This Morning a Tarantula Walked Over My Face.
The changes required may frighten us.
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We regularly receive bright eyed “change-makers” at our farm who are genuinely yearning to help transform the world in a better way. They often come from the city and usually found out about us because they came across Jon Jondais now infamous Ted Talk, “Life is Easy”. People love his message. I do to. What P’ Jo, as we affectionately refer to Jon as here, consistently suggests however is not that life is without struggle but that modernities unique kind of struggle is unnecessary. He is not saying that life will be without challenges, or that we won’t need to make big changes in order for the “easy life” to emerge. What he is saying, is that once the appropriate changes are made, once we have let go of modernities strange story and again come into alignment with reality, then life will be less stressful because we will be in the flow again, with wisdom, confidence and community.
There is a lot to unpack here. And I want to avoid turning any of these conversations into overly philosophical echo-chambers where more time is spent waxing poetic than digging in. Some of you may have received the call out I sent a few days ago with an open invitation to come spend some time with us on our farm. The best way to begin to understand what P’ Jo means when he says “Life is easy. Why do we make it so hard?” is to come an see for yourself. Live with us for a few weeks. Better yet, come stay for a few months. Make some real time to realign your sleeping with the movements of celestial bodies. Allow your eyes to spend far more time looking at plants and soil than an eerily glowing screen. Reaquaint yourself with the multi dimensional world of actual life. Slowly ween off the sad addiction most have for the illusory, 2- dimensional world trapped inside the computer.
So, that being said, I won’t go into the details of Jo’s view here. You have to touch the earth more and live directly inside the messy beauty of land based, community life to get it. Talk isn't enough to convey what P’Jo is trying to share. It all must be directly lived into. But one thing anyone hoping to come to Pun Pun needs to know before coming or for that matter anyone wishing to challenge modernities mediocre views in general by exploring an alternative narrative must consider, is that even though another beautiful, in some ways “easier” world is possible, it will first require a major transformation for most that will, for a time, be hard and uncomfortable. Unless you were raised in a rural village with no electricity that still knew how to live off the land well, than it is likely you have become quite comfortable living within empires strange realm of disconnect, even if you see its flaws and wish to escape/transform it.
Increasingly, people the world over are yearning to “return to nature”. People are feeling lonely and are seeking more intimate community. They can see that the gross excess of material goods in their lives is harmful and they rightly wish to purge. All this is good and the fact that people are beginning to feel with their guts again, I think, is a truly fantastic sign. Yet before we withdrawal our life savings and run to the mountains to buy land and forge a new commune based on ideas mined from various YouTube channels, it would be wise to first consider the often glanced over discomforts that lay ahead as we boldly journey back into sanity.
If you have ever traveled to any place that lies at the edges of “modernity” and walking through the confident village alleys where kids run around joyfully with flies in their face you may have wondered, Why don’t those flies bother them as much as they do me?. Precisely. What is that all about? It has to do with the myriad sad side effects of consuming far too much of the developed worlds conveniences, to the point where unless we have air conditioning, a giant bed with silky smooth linens, an iPhone attached to us at all times, etc. than we are uncomfortable. Any heat, any buzzing insects, any discomforts of any kind and we can’t think straight. And this my friends is just the tip of the iceberg.
Having lived separately from Nature for so long, our ability to find ease with Her has atrophied. A single fly buzzing around our head is liable to debilitate us, rendering any project we might be working on virtually impossible until the fly is killed. Observe a land-based Akkha boy in the mountains near my home here in Northern Thailand however, and you won’t find him getting worked up at all. And usually more flies will soon join the party. Likely other insects too. And crying babies and grumpy, over worked dads and gossiping ladies and drunk uncles and… all of it. All with no comfy furniture, little privacy, lots of noise, no air con, barking dogs, sweat running into the eyes along with the flies and yet still… a omnipresent, cool, calm focus. An undeterred ability to get shit done, help others and find time to relax, to be at peace. To be a part of everything that is happening, as it unfolds in real time.
I have not yet mastered the art of finding this peace myself. I, like many of you, come from the modern world of being afraid of spiders, being easily aggravated by too many noises, etc. Having grown up with little to no contact with dirt or unpredictability, chaos makes me nervous. After over a decade of living close to the Land, even though I am convinced this is the superior lifestyle, I still find it very difficult. And I have come to terms with the fact I might not be able to find real grace with this in my lifetime. But this effort to ditch modernities life crushing addiction to too much of everything seems important nonetheless, so I am committed to learning how to unlearn and rewild. I feel strongly we all need to consider similar commitments if we are ever going to preserve well this precious planet for future generations.
We all know we can’t keep living like we do now. The ecolological footprint of an average American was too big when I was ten years old! I shutter to think of how big it is now. And nowadays Chinese people have adopted our insane quality of life as well, as have countless other people the world over! Everyone wants to live in a big bugless apartment with aircon and a t.v. Everyone wants a car and big headphones, t-shirts, dark shades, a flat brimmed hat and a smart phone. Fair enough. To each their own. Yet this particular post-modern lifestyle choice quickly forces us to lose our ability to live well in a place. Suddenly that which we had no problem with becomes unbearable. Agreements are forgotten. And with them, necessary skillsets are lost.
The kinds of homes that most who live below the poverty line in The States live in today are still like little castles compared to what most people in the world live in. And the World Bank would have us all believe that this is a terrible thing and we need to strive to have everyones “quality of living” improve by such in such a date, etc. in order to “fix” this. Such arrogance. Such Wrong View. Yes, in the parts of the world that have been totally destroyed by various colonization projects, where western expansion has laid slaughter to traditional land based lifeways than yes, we are absolutely responsible to clean up these messes, but that should not suggest we need to recreate more mini suburbs all over the world, where the inhabitants are to depend on all of modernities conveniences and thus no longer capable of activating ancient skills, skills that in many cases are far superior to say, sitting on a porcelain throne to take a shit.
I’ll leave the “How Humanity Shits” topic for another time. Again, a lot to unpack. Let’s just say for now though, we don’t need toilet paper! There should never be a massive panic like we saw in the COVID lockdown days regarding not being able to wipe ones ass. If ever there was a “first world problem” this is it. Knowing how to wipe ones own ass is probably the most basic of all human understandings and yet those in the so-called “developed” world, have no fucking clue how to do it unless they have a fresh fluffy roll of dead tree. Our own body grosses us out! Yikes! What we need to do is regenerate our abilities to live naturally, which is a time honored human skill that has nearly gone extinct within the last twenty years. We are rapidly forgetting how to live as human beings. Globally. And it isn’t enough to merely live “close to nature”. We need to be more natural. To be a real human, is to be really natural.
Ok. Since we are on the topic of shit, a little story. Last night, in the middle of the night around 2 A.M. I woke up to the sound of something crashing. I leapt out of my bed (a simple mattress on the floor) and rushed to find the source of the commotion. It was my wife. She had killed a tokay (a very colorful, medium-sized lizard that is regularly found in homes throughout rural Chiang Mai). Being a Buddhist, she felt conflict in her heart and doing this but she exclaimed exuberantly, “I can’t deal with cleaning up any more lizard shit!”.
When one ponders the idyllic romance of leaving behind the city life and moving to a beautiful tropical eco-village they seldom consider that at least an hour each day will be devoted to cleaning up lizard shit.
…
This morning, after the tokay incident, I couldn’t sleep so I got to writing a bit on a book I have been stumbling through for some ten years or so that will likely never surface but it keeps me nonetheless entertained in some morbid way. Eventually I got tired. So I pulled out one of the common elephant embroidered mattresses you may have seen in your local bohemian coffee house, the funky ones that hale from Thailand and seem to have become quite popular among American hippies in recent years. I lied down on it and immediately closed my eyes for a short pre-dawn rest when suddenly a furry wind-like scatter scurried across my face. Like an irrupting volcano I bolted out of bed and watched as a terrified tarantula sped to the corner of our home, unsure what his next move should be.
A few years ago, while taking a mid-day nap with my then only 2 year old daughter, on the same mattress I was hoping to rest on this morning, I rolled over to try and protect my little girl from the dengue invested mosquitos that were relentlessly managing to find ways into our protective net when not two feet away from us a king cobra looked me in the eyes, all flared up, dancing mysteriously, just like in those old Bollywood movies. Unbelievable! I have never felt so scared before in my life. Without thinking I did what any earth loving, back-to-the-land change maker would do, I quickly grabbed my machete and chopped its head off.
Scorpions. Centipedes. Mold. Leeches. Dust. Flooding. Thorny Vines. And on and on it goes. I often get jealous, I must confess, when I receive automated email replies from some of my more modernized colleagues elsewhere in the world that say “It’s the weekend! I’ll check in with you on Monday!”. Must be nice. There is no weekend when you live this way. A natural, land-based life is constant, unpredictable, always in motion. It’s a full time job that requires of us ALL our senses. An ability to plug info into data bases or organize a budget well doesn’t mean shit in this reality. What matters is ones ability to react quickly to actual life, to remain calm when life’s myriad adornments dance before you and see them not as obstacles but as kin, even when said “kin” is a deadly snake. (We held a prober burial for that king and his spirit now protects our land alongside the other Naga.)
Our generations skin has grown soft. In order for us to make the type of changes life requires of us now we all have to grow this skin back. Not all of what the conspiracy theorists are saying is crazy. A lot of it is. A LOT of it . But should we know where our food comes from? Yes. Should we learn how to make a fire? Yes. Should we learn how to grow food ourselves? Yes. Should we learn again how to find and treat water? Yes. Should we know how to use a knife? Yes. Should we be able to find, if not comfort with, at least an ability to be with high heat for long periods of time, to be in a room with spiders and other insects without totally freaking out, to be (gasp!) dirty? Yes. We need regenerate a balance of relationship again with the natural world. Yes. Yes. Yes. This is all absolutely imperative of us all. Now and forever.
Clearly I have offered some extreme examples here of what arrises when humans return to a Right Relation with Earth. Not everyone who lives in an adobe house has a King Cobra wake them up from their mid-day nap. But it does seem that their is this strange breed of progressive capitalist who thinks we can have our cake and eat it too. That we can keep living lives of uber luxury and also live in community with others and the land. (*See Crested Butte, Colorado). To be in community, by definition means to come together. And that means come together with more than just other people but all the things we have been running away from for so long like creepy crawlies, dirt and hot summer days. You can’t do this if you are inside a mansion while all life is outside your window. It doesn’t matter how close to you the ski hill is. If your toes aren’t freezing, you still are a million years away.
We do need to return to the earth. But we need to do so on Her terms, not ours. We need to be courteous enough to abandon the anthropocentrism that suggests humans’ wants and needs trump those of all other life forms. No one seemed too concerned for the cobra, or the tokay, or the flies! Yet, it isn’t they who are the guests here, it is us. If we are ever going to learn again how to live well in their garden we had better learn how to see the world as they do, gain honest respect for them and their marvelous ways that for so long we have deemed as less intelligent than ours. We need to challenge our fears not only of other people and other religions but so too of other species, other climates and other elemental conglomerations.
Sometimes, I must confess, I have found this to be scary. I still get spooked, for example, when I see giant spiders. But it isn’t exactly arachnophobia anymore, at least not like what I experienced growing up in Illinois. Now it is more like a vivid form of curiosity, respect and awe. I do sleep with one eye open many nights. The jungle requires us to stay alert. But not in a state of panic. I am growing new capacities that don’t require me to sleep as much. New senses are fruiting. Especially for my daughter, who carries no fear for any bugs, snakes or spiders whatsoever. Having never lived with aircon, she never complains of the heat. She is comfortable in the dark and finds the sounds of the forest to be charming. The Wild, in turn, recognizes her.
The creatures around us are magical teachers able to teach us all we need to know about living well. These beings are not strange at all, they are our relatives and we are guests in their home.
No Explosions
By Naomi Shihab Nye
To enjoy
fireworks
you would have
to have lived
a different kind
of life
Jon Jondai Life is Easy YouTube channel.
#maypeaceprevailonearth
Good one, I can definitely empathize a lot. Today I got stung by a scorpion hiding in a biece of bamboo, and bitten by two leeches and countless mosquitoes. Rainy season here is no walk in the park. You made a lot of really important points here, and I wholeheartedly share your views. Modern life has made us soft, and we have to rediscover the sort of toughness that comes with living a lifestyle more in line with the ecological reality we evolved for. I find it unfortunate that the political right has appropriated the concept of "toughness" & "strength," because that's kind of exactly what we'll need more of over the coming years and decades, no matter where on the political spectrum we find ourselves.
The so-called simple life can be difficult as hell, but in contrast to wage slavery at least it's worth it!
Nice post.
Living in Florida I'm somewhat acclimated to heat and creepy crawly things. But can't say I've woken up to a cobra or tarantula before. That'll get the heart racing.