August 2024

Dear friends,

From the height of summer I bring you a glimpse of what is happening in Puyuelo. This time our News Letter is sent out in both English and Spanish and from now on, thanks to Felix, it is possible to subscribe and automatically receive the next editions. Things are turning professional around here!

The past few weeks our infrastructure has been heavily put to practice in a series of events.

Like last year, the festival in July felt to me like a celebration of Puyuelo. There is few things I enjoy so much as seeing people of different age and standing interact, especially in a setting that seems to inspire and relax. All in all we had a couple of dozen people coming by. We had topics as diverse as suicide, Kung-Fu, creative writing, eco-villages, psychology and anthropology scheduled. As a closure of the festival we enjoyed an intimate concert by Alberto Fuentes in the ruin of the church. Alberto sang and played the guitar for us. His so-called medicine music usually accompanies South American cacao or ayahuasca ceremonies and within the very special setting of the church that made for one of the most beautiful moments I have personally experienced in Puyuelo. I realized churches make a lot more sense without roofs and priests, with people singing under the stars.

Two days before Aly’s birthday, in the midst of the women week, we found out we hadn’t seen the donkeys for a while. We decided to wait a bit when, on a Wednesday morning, I suddenly saw a message appear in one of the regional Whatsapp groups. Two donkeys had appeared at 4 am in the nearby village of Silves where they had made so much noise that its four inhabitants were kept awake till dawn. James, Ole and I did not hesitate and jumped in the car. In a straight line Silves is only three kilometers away, yet the fastest path requires some climbing and is impossible to walk with donkeys.

For the first time ever, Leo and Ena ran away from Puyuelo and embarked on the same journey we had taken when we brought them here more than one and a half years ago. An astonishing accomplishment, since the track back to their original home in Guaso is not easy to find in Janovas. One has to follow the river upstream for a while and then at one point turn left into the forest. When I asked James if he would have found it himself, he admitted he might not, which led us to the conclusion that the donkeys have a better orientational memory than James. I am happy he himself asked: ‘But is that a reference?’. After four hours of walking in the scorching heat we made it back home, fried, exhausted, but with the same contentment I feel after most adventures.

The smoke of the festival had barely cleared up when Aly kicked off her non-mixed working week. We all wandered off. Except for Felix, none of us had a very clear plan of where to go exactly. I cannot say a lot about the week itself, since I was obviously not there, but from the outside I got the impression it was very valuable for all of them. Our absence from Puyuelo exposed a lot of dynamics that are still deeply tinged by patriarchal society. As I understood, the women left in Puyuelo felt a lot freer, less observed, more confident on the construction site, and less judged. Soon after, we saw ourselves again around the table with four men and one women, an imbalance that felt almost more inappropriate than ever. So again we repeat in all directions: Puyuelo would like to grow and would especially welcome more women. Aly plans the next non-mixed working week somewhere next year, keep track of this News Letter if you are interested.

To end August, I received Melle and five friends for an experiment. They reached out to me as a group of people dreaming about starting a communal project (in the very broad sense of the word). For four days we worked together, exploring communal techniques and dynamics, and then slowly put some words and deeds to the dream they were looking for. On the last evening we buried that dream ceremonially in Saco’s totem pole, a monument to stubbornness and dedication. All of us in Puyuelo feel like continuing that experiment. Therefore, if you know a group of people that dreams about a communal and/or non-conformist future, feel all the liberty to bring them in contact with us so we can explore if we can do something meaningful together.

Ok. Before I fully trip over into a self-help format, here is some more concrete facts. James is on good speed when it comes to building up his second house. We have almost finished the walls and will then move into the roof construction. Aly is well on the way with her atelier. Her 30^th birthday party was an absolute success and we are all sad we’ll have to wait another eight years for the next round birthday (unless our new inhabitants are under 30?).

What is left for autumn? In September Laura comes by for a longer period to see and feel if she finally moves into Puyuelo. Aly finishes her atelier. James puts a roof on his new house. The Germans and Aly go to Europa Park (whoever feels like seeing a photo of Felix and Moritz on a rollercoaster or of Aly with a cotton candy; contact Sonja Garbe). At the end of October we plan our first harvest celebration. I will start the group facilitation course in Lakabe. James will start the second year of the group facilitation course in Lakabe.

WARNING: all factual data about Puyuelo was above. Below is just some personal rambling of mine. You have the right to stop here if you want.

To me personally the past year has been a rediscovery of the world outside of Puyuelo. I have discovered a lot of places where I feel really at home and where I meet a lot of people that resonate to me. Out of a growing acceptance of who I am and what we are doing, I notice it is also easier than before to quickly and genuinely connect to others. Through all that, I have felt a renewed strength of being able to say ‘yes’ to life and how Puyuelo is a place that enables us to repeatedly do so. What do I mean by that?

I believe saying yes to life comes with cultivating the quality of listening to who you really are and what brings you most strength. In a book I read about masculinity and the Greek Gods¹, the author described how we can use the archetypes of the Greek Gods to find our own personal myth. A proper understanding of the forces within us, followed by the will to live out that understanding, makes us more authentic people and that will always lead to more beauty and harmony. Yet to be able to do so, to say yes to what feels most right to us, often means learning how to shut down secondary voices. The voice of self-doubt (I can’t, I don’t know..), the voice of society (you shouldn’t, you should..) or similar pragmatic voices (will I have enough money if..). Saying yes means going beyond those voices, reconnecting to deeper, more instinctive parts of ourselves and choosing those people and actions that entail inspiration and learning. The past year has reconnected me to the adventure life becomes the more we manage to do so.

Please don’t understand me wrongly. I realize I myself have been able to move in that direction based on a lot of privileges. I am a white, educated, healthy man. Nobody told me the world was dangerous or I would not be able to do this or that (which patriarchy constantly does to women). Those privileges allowed me to go traveling on my own, to risk moving away from the trodden path and experiment with different approaches to life. Our multilayered privileges have enabled us to build up a place like Puyuelo, an endeavor which would hardly be possible for anyone who is less fortunate.

I think therefore a proper understanding and deconstruction of those privileges should be an important part of our struggle. I personally believe in building up a qualitative model of life that would work for as many people as possible, notwithstanding their gender, colour or economic capacity. If we’d succeed in doing that, many more people would get the chance to embrace life as a spiritual quest, as an adventure, rather than being consumed by stories that have been written by others before them.

In any case, even if you work in a different framework than we do now, saying yes can happen in very subtle and small ways. What if you say yes next time you see a hitchhiker, when a voice tells you you cannot do this or that alone (because “I am not as handy and don’t know how this damned tool works..”) or next time somebody offers you something crazy and your first impulse is curiosity (but then other parts of you starts doubting because maybe this or that..)? Although the road here still comes with ups and downs and there are always days I doubt about myself, this project and the future, Puyuelo has strengthened my trust in that attitude. It is addictive, rewarding and inspiring to say yes. This year I have seen many people that have inspired me by doing exactly that and I in turn feel grateful for that.

Just this week, as I write this news letter, I spent six days in Belgium to see my family. By now, and especially at the end of summer, it feels liberating to forget the daily responsibilities of Puyuelo for some days. The animals, the work, the constant subtle maintenance of our social balance. I enjoy simple things like cycling through Ghent, the smell of second hand book shops, shopping fancy vegan food. Yet always, soon enough, a feeling of uprootedness hits me.

The longer I live in Puyuelo, the more estranged I feel to life in society. By now it feels somehow strange that people don’t live with the land or the seasons. They might have an emotional connection to them but usually don’t directly depend on them, or at least not in visibly or corporal way. You don’t see where the water from the tap comes from. You don’t have to break your back and chop a tree in your backyard to heat yourself next winter. A working week in December usually looks more or less the same than one in May.

In Ghent, Marieke, a new friend of mine, gave me a small booklet called ‘We are nature defending itself’ by Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan, two well-known French activists. Both of them lived and worked in a city, before they moved into the ZAD (Zone a Defendre) close to Nantes. The ZAD is an area that was supposed to be turned into an airport, until activists managed to stop the bulldozers and block the project. In a Flixbus on the way back to Paris I read the following passage where they muse about their former selves:

“Like so many captured by the metropolitan logic, we were body-minds without anchor, we were discombobulated beings who had lost any sense of true place”

I look through the window, to the metal monsters full of industrial crap everywhere around me and realize this is what I feel like on this noisy highway of society: a body-mind without anchor, on the way home to what has become my anchor. A place where I know where the water sources are to be found, what autumn smells like and how solemn the silence feels in the midst of a snowstorm.

Jordan and Fremeaux continue:

“When you become attached to somewhere, when you realize that you can become the territory, freedom no longer floats in the air but lives in the relationships and the ties of needs and desire that you build. We fell in love with this place (the ZAD) and its rebel inhabitants and thus became free to overcome fear and put our lives in the way of those who wanted to destroy what had become our home. And when we let ourselves do that, we discovered that the more we inhabit this place, the more it inhabited us.”

What a wonderful way to look at freedom. Not the freedom of buying whatever you want and being whoever you like, but the freedom that sprouts when you are well-anchored. Not too well anchored so there is no room for internal or external movement. Yet just enough so you don’t drift in all directions. As our Flixbus crawls through the traffic jam at the gates of Paris, I feel that kind of anchored freedom burning inside me. I keep my calm. Even at this excruciating speed we are moving South, to those damned mountains where my favourite season soon begins…

We send you all a lot of love and good vibes,

Pablo, Felix, James, Moritz and Aly.

29th of August 2024

1 The Gods in Every Man – Jean Shinoda Bolen