PARA LEER ESTE TEXTO EN CASTELLANO: https://puyuelo.org/?p=1580
Dear friends,
A year. How does one narrate a year? It took me again a long time to write this letter. Not because nothing happened, but because so much happened that I did not find the eagle’s perspective to share some of it with all of you.
Let me start at what seemed like the end of a difficult year among us. I deliberately stay as much as possible with my own process, not to tell the story of the others, whose experience I definitely don’t understand fully.
Last autumn, I almost decided to leave Puyuelo. I felt the weight of another year of struggling to find balance between us on my shoulders, both morally and physically. I wasn’t sure if I myself could still overcome some of the patterns I got stuck in. If I believed Puyuelo would still represent me enough to keep on feeling like home.
On top of that, honestly, this is physically a challenging place and, with a tired body, the relief of throwing off the heavy part of the past five years suddenly seemed like the right thing to do. I imagined the road. Freedom. And for a moment would have immediately exchanged it for this process and its many challenges.
But – and I think that is something all five of us struggled with this year – how does one leave behind a home, built up with his or her own hands? A complex love relation with the land, the region, the people around us? In a constellation I did with somebody in November about Puyuelo, I received an important piece of the puzzle. Paulina, the constellator, told me. ‘You are a migrant. You left your country because you did not like the reality it offered you. How many more times do you want to do that? Or do you choose to do different this time and try to change things at home?’
Paulina’s message bugged me. Part of me had resigned this year, but it is true that I still believed in Puyuelo, that I still saw so much potential in this place, that I loved life here. Somehow I had the feeling we might have just begun to learn from our own mistakes. Living in a collective is not always easy, but it still fascinates and motivates me immensely. Figuring out what it is like to truly build a horizontal decision making process, to resolve our conflicts, communicate properly, to integrate all voices of a group, to decide together on what we think is a moral life instead of what others dictate us.
On top of that, a mixture of different things kept me back. A part of it was ego: I have become Puyuelo and I like the identity it gives me, what if I leave that behind? What will be left of me? Another part was fear: what if leaving is the wrong decision, where will I end up? And lastly: a big chunk of hope: there is so much to do still in this place, so much left to dream about. All of them played their part, but it was impossible for me to discern to what extent.
On a more practical level, it mostly bugged me to leave the village behind with so few people. If one day I leave here, it would pain me a lot less to leave a lively village, a collective project that can deal with the coming and going of people without ending up in an existential crisis every time. For that all of us agree at this point, we need a bigger group of people. And, I believe, we also share the will on working hard to organize ourselves better; to build a structure that reflects all of us to a more equal degree so it can carry us and make our lives and coordination easier.
The word that comes to me is resilience. When I look around me at a rapidly changing world, maybe not for the better, that sounds like a good quality, both on the personal and the collective level. To stand in the eye of many storms and adapt, to remain quiet and understanding; flexible. To be both silent and rebellious, to meditate and resist, to follow the course of nature and remain true to who we feel we are.
Let me be clear. I understand the decision to leave Puyuelo behind. Life has never been ‘easy’ here. By now I understood how uncontrollable a collective process is. How it never really goes as you hope or want, how big of an influence other people have on your life, how fast you have to be in learning, listening, healing old wounds, overcoming your own shadow. How many moments I lived through where I got stuck in anger, despair, whatever dark feelings those damned silent mountains than amplify and throw back at you.
The nature of our project is horizontal, if we’d manage to grow in that process we’d hopefully built a home that reflects all of us more or less equally. Yet experience has learned by now that horizontality is not just an easily introduced political concept. It is a laborious process, one that involves an exploration of our emotional and rational selves, both individually and collectively. Who am I? What parts of myself do I repress? What is my position in this group? Where are my privileges or shortcomings? Fascinating if it inspires you. Draining if you don’t feel its calling.
At the doorstep of winter, we reached something like a breakthrough. Felix decided he no longer wanted to be part of the collective process in Puyuelo. He would keep on living here part of the year, but retreat to a large extent from the project. He is now also heavily involved in the new project in San Martin and will mostly put his focus there. James, on the other hand, needed a break from our process, and will from spring on spend a full year in Lakabe, an older community in Navarra. Aly, Moritz and I decided to bundle the little forces we had left and give it another try. Quite soon though, the handful of people that I had hoped to possibly move in here, disappeared again, obeying to the will of their own destiny.
Honestly, as the trees grew barren and the first cold came, my hopes were low. Suddenly I empathized with the hundreds of villages all over this country that are on the verge of extinction. Too little inhabitants left, barely any public services, long distances to the urban centers where the 21st century-show happens. I guess like us, many of the inhabitants left in those dying villages love their home and hope for better times to return. Yet every time winter shows its teeth, cold and humidity must also erode the remaining hope. Why, I wondered, would our situation be different? Only five years after saving this village from oblivion, we confronted a problem that plagues a whole nation. This century did not start as the century of small things. Whoever decides to take their side will have to work hard.
However, from the beginning of this project I have felt we are accompanied by a very good wind. In a Vipassana course last year I met Olivia, member of Enera, a group of friends from Zaragoza looking for a house in the countryside to start their own collective. After a personal setback they had no place to stay this winter, so we offered them our common house. They accepted the offer, bravely so, because the infrastructure was basic and this winter turned out to be a though one. Initially I even cherished hopes they might decide to stay, but soon I understood that was not what they appeared for. By the end of their stay I realized their presence mostly helped us to keep the flame alive. To see Puyuelo during the toughest time of the year alive, resisting to go down, while we as a small group slowly looked each other in the eye again and started wondering how to continue from here on. The friendship with Enera has been a gift of this winter, I hope they find a home close to us so we can keep on building it out.
Also in december, Lara moved in with me, in a more formal attempt to see if she could make Puyuelo her home. Since then she has been of incredible value to revitalize the small constellation we had become. The four of us started to plan, to dream again of yet another spring in Puyuelo. A delicate process, with the risk of falling into old patterns, fears, misunderstandings, but one in which I see in all of us the goodwill, the will to turn the page and build something strong, durable, something we all feel good with.
The first days of February, Enera and James left, both coincidentally on the same day. On the evening before their departure we lit a huge bonfire, as if symbolically ending a chapter and opening a new one. I felt sad, a bit incapable of grasping what was happening, of facing such a long period without my best friend here. The following day even the mountains wept, from morning to evening it rained and snowed incessantly, as if Puyuelo mourned its losses.
The rain continued for a couple of days, in what was the wettest winter for Spain since 25 years. Somewhere mid February the first signs of spring arrived. Some flowers left and right, green dots between the yellow bushes, and most of all, the wonderful image of large flocks of cranes flying over on their way back North.
As the world wakes up again, I too recognized how slowly hope comes back to me. Our process feels somehow different, as if the extremity of the situation put our feet on the ground, told us that to keep on living here and see the village flourish again we really will have to work hard. To listen to each other. To bring some compromise and responsibility to the table. It would be foolish to celebrate to soon, too much can happen and there is so many unpredictable factors, but something to what is happening feels very right to me. There is a voice that keeps on coming back that says: this is the collective process, this is how it looks like to grow together and learn to understand each other. I feel very grateful for Aly and Moritz and Lara to bring the energy and compromise to the table. As for James, Felix and Laura, I hope they got what they needed now and find their way back to us if that is what they feel one day.
Over the next weeks and months we mostly want to bring back life to this village, to put our infrastructure to service both for us and for different causes. From now on we will host a monthly 1 day Vipassana course, we want to receive visitors again and prepare a series of events for spring and summer. We are building on a solid structure, also with the intention of safely being able to integrate new people when they find their way to us. Last week was a big day when the first laundry machine ran on one of our 12 Volt solar systems and … Moritz and I have started developing a cable system to pull loads on the hill without breaking our backs (to be continued). In the meantime, Aly continues almost singlehandedly on cutting pines and planting a new forest, Moritz develops his ceramics, Lara discovers all dimensions of Puyuelo and I have started an attempt in domesticating Tito, our newborn donkey. As the world outside goes it crazy course, we keep on watering the beautiful little plant we hold between us, hoping it grows into something lasting.
With love,
Pablo, Aly, Moritz, Lara.
Puyuelo (25th of February 2026)
