On 11th July, Awakin Talks hosted a conversation with Hang Mai and Chau Duong on Permaculture and Prema-culture. What follows is a loving summary of the conversation crafted by Khang :)

“It takes a certain degree of clarity and a certain degree of courage in certain measures to make certain radical decisions in your life,” that’s how Ragu introduced Hang Mai and Chau Duong in our Awakin Talk.

Before she set off the "Back to the Land" revolution in Vietnam, Hang Mai was the regional director of a multinational corporation. Her fieldwork in rural areas revealed for her the flawed philosophy behind Corporate Social Responsibility and the truth of Gandhi’s statement, that,“The world has enough for everyone’s needs but not enough for one person’s greed.” On this journey of enabling herself and others to live in harmony with nature, Hang Mai met Chau Duong in a jungle, where he has lived and worked for over 20 years. By that time, Chau Duong had been offering training sessions on Permaculture Design for decades, as a framework to learn from and partner with the indigenous peoples of Vietnam to revitalize degraded lands.

Hang Mai and Chau Duong’s marriage was celebrated with gifts from friends and farmers throughout the country. Now, together, they spend their lives making a home for all. A home for the inner garden free of greed, anger and ignorance. A home for the diverse life forms teeming in their two-hectare farm. A home for the community around them, including not only their transformed neighborhood but also the young and old people who are returning from the cities back to the homelands, back to nature.

Ragu: If there's like a drone flying on top of your farm, tell us, what would we see?

Chau: Our farm is located in Ba Ria - Vung Tau province, in southern Vietnam. Since French colonization, the land has been changed a lot from natural forest into rubber plantations for over a hundred years now. For the past 30-40 years, the previous owners planted a monoculture of rambutans. Intensive, the same ways as farmers do it all over the world. After we moved here, we allowed the land to regenerate naturally. We spent much of those 3-4 years just learning and observing what happens on our farm. If you don’t stay in the farm, you cannot imagine how amazingly nature regenerates. It’s more like a jungle now. I could only know and make a list of over 100 species or so. The rest I don’t know.

Ragu: You know, there is a perception that you are living a life of minimalism. But what you are telling now sounds like not minimal at all! It’s pretty rich to me. So how would you explain that?

Hang: I like your question about abundance and minimalism. If we don't minimize our needs, we take all from others. But if we minimize, we leave space for others. To live a happy life, there are 2 axes. One is to minimize your space, and then you return the maximum to others, to nature.

Chau: It's true that our farm grew richer and richer. The more we stay in our farm, the more we know how to use things, not only for food, medicine, building materials, and many other uses. We have many things to share with our neighbors. The problem is our neighbors don’t have many types of trees or fruits any more. They focus on monoculture, since that’s what makes you rich now, in terms of money.

And, we try to move according to the sun's direction. Everything on our farm is a product of biomass. It’s a really free energy bomb, the sun. It’s free for everyone, not only for us. It’s very abundant also, very generous, if we change the way we go.

Ragu: It's nice to hear that and feels good about it, but I'm sure people listening here would wonder how practical that could be. What's your relationship with money? What's the economy of living this kind of life?

Hang: Many people think because we’re rich enough, we can afford to live ‘minimalism’ now. Actually, we have many friends who are not rich and they still choose this lifestyle. Once you choose this lifestyle, you lighten your burden for yourself. You have more time to live than to earn a living.

But, we don't deny money. If we need 100 dollars and have only 50, then that’s hard. But if we need 100 dollars and already have 200, then we decide we don't earn more. We spend time on other things that are important to us. About how others can shift their life, I think it's all about their inner call. Minimalism requires some kind of courage. You have to step out of your comfort zone that consumerism creates.

For us, the last four years since we lived on the farm was a learning process. The more we learn, the more we trust that there’s always enough for everyone, if we know what is enough. We know how to adapt to nature, instead of making nature satisfy all that you want but not what you need.

When we first moved here, I was the one who was more impatient than Chau, because I was born in the city. I wanted Chau to do this and that, plant here and there, to make it a comfortable farm. He said, “You can’t do that. You can’t require that from the farm, after 20 years of chemical intensive farming. You need to give the land some time to get healthier, and we’ll see what the farm can give us.” Now, we don’t ask anything from the farm. Even the farmers around us are struggling with their farms, how can we - city folks - think we can live comfortably? We earned some, but not enough compared to our need for money in the first year. Step by step, we reduce our money needs by improving our skills.
For a long time, I didn’t cook, during university and my corporate jobs. Here, I became the homemaker, cooking three meals a day. Chau didn’t know about woodworking, building a house, cutting grass. Before moving here he used to have a team to do those tasks. We learn all that in our 40s. The money we need reduces in reverse proportion to the skills we have.

We learnt how to cook from what the farm provides, instead of demanding the farm to give us what we’re used to in the city. In the city we only know 10-20 vegetables. The farm gives us 80 other types, and we think, “Oh the farm doesn't give us any food!” We adapt, learn to eat and cook those 80 types to nurture ourselves, instead of forcing the soil to give us the old, chemical-intensive vegetables. Since we’ve come back and we live on the farm, we see the abundance every day, every hour.

Ragu: I am really hoping to go to your farm someday and stay there. Although you two have been farming for fewer years than Nisha and I have, I have a feeling that your farm is probably richer in multiple ways. I came from a total corporate background from the US to India. And, most of the initial setup we ended up doing in our farms was just using money. Since you two didn’t go that route, a lot of the stuff, the crops, the house, are of completely different kinds than what we ended up there. Normally we consider money as an enabler, but in this context that I am portraying that, at least I have these two examples, my own farm and your farm, mine is probably not as great as yours because you didn’t use money.

Now, imagine a new couple on an old pickup truck, that's Hand and Chau’s honeymoon trip. The intention of this honeymoon trip, going from villages to villages, was to connect with people and have spontaneous gatherings to talk about shifting to a sustainable life. A lot of people in the different villages spontaneously offered them stuff, materials that they could use to build the house.

So they got all the materials and they got a lot of volunteers to make the material suitable for building, and then actually help them to build also. The material, the labor, all of them were gifted to them. It’s quite an accomplishment actually, if you think about it, that is, the house gets built and in the course of that, the community's also getting built. You cannot get that by giving money. You could give money and get some material and build your house, but you cannot give money and build the community.

Chau: We are used to living in a way where for everything we have to use money. So we think without money, it’s difficult to live in the garden. Since we moved to live on our farm, we’ve learnt to do a lot of activities in different ways without involving money or very less money. For example, people come and help us build the house, to do lots of work on the farm. We exchange and rotate labor in our community here. Of course I also go to work with them. In return, they can come and help us.

By working together, for me, I learn many other skills I didn’t know before. It’s not only become a habit to do things, but also it’s a learning process. Since we came here, we started to rebuild again the way how people give and share together. This time of year, we have rambutans now, so we give rambutans to people. We have bananas, we give. In return, if they have anything, our neighbors also give to us. We don't use money in this. That fulfills a lot of needs in our daily life.
And it makes stronger community relationships. It’s not just labor. It’s about people who can help us in many, many other activities in daily life. Instead of trying to earn more financial capital, we also can increase social capital, and knowledge and skills. Especially skill capital. That is important. Not only living on the farm, but in many other cases you need skill also.

Jignasha: When you're met with floods, with storms, like we had it very bad recently in South India, how do you cope with nature? Where do you find that inner strength and what are those coping mechanisms to work through that?

Ragu: I actually sat with them and asked those questions. How do you do this and that? Hang Mai was washing dishes with me, and I spontaneously asked her, “So what do you use to wash dishes? You’ve got to use something, right?” “Oh,” she said, “we use ash.” She and Chau taught us to treat the ash and convert that into dishwashing liquid.
Then I didn't stop. I started asking, so what about the clothes you're wearing, the utensils, the farm tools? And for every one of them, they had very similar answers. They make a lot of little things, containers, utensils, baskets, mats, from food and other material from their farm, and from the community they built around the farm. I remember Hang Mai calls Chau the External Affairs Minister of their family, meaning that he is constantly in communication with people around the farm.

Essentially, the way they deal with need difficulty is that they have set up themselves in a quite robust, very diverse way. Because of the diversity and because of maximum use of the local economy, it becomes very possible for them to hedge their bets and live this way.

Jignasha: You're moving out of comfort and it's a tough life, right? Moving onto a farm is so physically tough and emotionally challenging, what is your source of joy and how do you cultivate that?

Ragu: If a person is asked to sit in one place in a dark room for two hours and not move nor speak, they would feel frustrated, right? But millions of people do that every day around the world. They go to the theater and sit there and watch a movie for two hours. It's exactly the same thing, sitting in one place and not moving. And yet people don't feel frustrated. The reason obviously would be that the mind and the heart are engaged in something.

We don't need a movie, a video game or something external to do it to us. Where we live, we don’t don't have a TV at home. There's no restaurants, no malls, no libraries, no source of entertainment anywhere within 25 kilometers from our house. There’s this notion that entertainment is a separate activity that you do in between some other activities you perform for the sake of livelihood. If we remove all of that, and find ways to live such that there's no difference between work life and personal life and entertainment, ... I think the real answer for that is the degree of involvement.

Even enjoying struggles. There are struggles that are worth going through, that really enriches you.

Jignasha: One other question that I had was, what is your relationship with everybody around you who is not living that kind of life? What are your places of connection? Where do your values get challenged?

Ragu: It was very difficult for us at that time to relate to other people who had not shared our beliefs. But when we started living here, something else happened to the very same people. We are able to relate much better. Imagine 20 people, completely different from each other, if they all were to come into a room. And let’s say the room has 15 two-to-five-year-old kids. We can easily imagine that in spite of all the diversity of the people who get into that room, every person will be able to relate to these kids with joy, without bringing their own biases and their own conditioning. There's something about interacting with kids that adults get into a space within themselves, which is open enough, which has a certain degree of innocence and courage and playfulness. Nature offers a similar opportunity.

The value system we are living by has changed quite a bit for the last 12 - 15 years on this farm. We plant a lot of things throughout the year. It's the same farm, the same soil, the same weather conditions, the same bottle, and yet the different species we keep planting on the farm behave differently. Some grow very fast, some take two years to even sprout a little bit. Some yield very well. A certain number just don't even grow. Then, a certain degree of acceptance comes into our heart by saying, “Okay, this is what the land is doing. It does what it does.” I cannot command the land that I need this much from my bananas this year. I cannot make such requests to my farm. I sort of adopted that same mentality when I'm meeting people.

So I started valuing the connection itself, as opposed to what happens because of the connection. I'm not even thinking I should have a great conversation. What happens because of the connection is secondary. If I can maintain a connection at all, I see that itself is something. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. Learning from nature helps us deepen

Jignasha: Masanobu Fukuoka talks about how farming is actually about purification of the human spirit. Would you like to share some stories around that?

Hang: For Fukuoka, farming is a means to cultivate himself. That is the ultimate goal. At first when you read that, it sounds deep but complicated. But the more we practice, we see that is true. Most of the time we heard the questions from the new practitioners, “How can you do nothing on a farm?” And we come to understand that when we talk about doing nothing, it doesn't mean that you do nothing.

Doing nothing is actually about standing, observing, being aware of invisible forces. We don’t need to water or fertilize the rambutans, but all other invisible forces are doing that.

Because we know very little, most people think being a farmer is an easy job. The more we stay on the farm, we realize that farming requires a lot of wisdom. Farming also requires a lot of contentment. Because if you bring greed to the farm, and want the farm to satisfy all your greed, it’s not possible. The farm canot supply you with that much money you need in the city. The farm gives you abundant food and materials, not money.

You need to work a lot with the inner garden if you want to be a farmer. Replace ignorance with wisdom, greed with contentment to see what’s around you, anger with serenity. If you work well with your inner garden, you’ll be happy with your outer garden. But it will take some time.
Now that we live on the farm, we don’t have many problems. We wish other friends who have an intention, without a piece of land, if you care about the safety and happiness of your own, to come back to the homeland as soon as possible. Because we need some time to learn and adapt to nature, after a long time of disconnection.

Jignasha: Right now you have this land, but for city folks who are planted there for whatever reason, how can they cultivate this mindset? What are your insights for them to take into their life and use that as a way to heal the human spirit?

Chau: Thanks to the last trip to India, visiting Ragu and Nisha, and attending a retreat, we’re inspired a lot by the ways our friends are living. Hang and I decided to do more to share with people in the city how to farm, or to live more simply. We also believe that even people without a farm, if you can make a beautiful inner garden, then that’s already beautiful.

Hang: The first thing we can do is become really aware of our consumption. Some ways are really destructive, some are less. You can choose to buy something when you need it. In terms of food, you eat 3 times a day, that’s the way you relate to nature. If you know about where it came from, how it was grown, that’s a small step. Don’t waste food.
Nowadays we don’t have that sense of home, for family, for community, for this earth. Living on a farm with our neighbors teaches us that, in order to be self-reliant, you have to rely on others. We still need to buy some things. Self-reliant as a single family is harder than in a community. Even if the city is not the ideal place, we still can put things in the commons. With COVID now, even food delivery is forbidden in Ho Chi Minh City. We learnt to share. The poorest still receive food from others.

Jignasha: How can we, as a Service Space community, be of service to you?

Hang: I discussed with Chau, “What can we do for Saigon, in this lockdown period with many people suffering?” I was nurtured by that city for 25 years. Chau said, maybe the best thing we can do is continue what we’re doing, supporting people in their journey of returning to the villages. The city didn’t nourish people. When we see water in the lake, it’s not where water really comes from. We are the resources that the city draws from many villages.

So if we move out of the city, it’s also an act of kindness for the city. Because of the population density, just like on monoculture farms, diseases will spread. Where there’s high human density, instead of biomass, we have too much human mass. From the eye of a virus, that’s great.

We think that we want to continue to do what we are doing. We continue to live in the farm, and we support people who want to return to the village. Chau said that, "the function of the highlands is not to produce food for the lowlands. The highlands are there to protect the lowlands, to do its job, like the water.” This means that we continue our work, and you continue your work, is your best service to us.


Living in a composted house with open doors
rooted at the heart of those forest floors
growing a jungle of love
in nature’s design we trust
farming permaculture gives life full color
it’s nature’s cure healing us and one another
go deep into this rich soil
smile with ease, no need to toil
move at the pace of slow
learn to go with the flow
practicing indigenous wisdom
it’s a beautiful, holistic vision
for all of life in one harmony
all of us in a gift economy
start the one straw revolution
a movement of human evolution
Trust your essence, swa-dharma
Flow with this cycle of karma
service, simplicity, and surrender
loving all, our hearts so tender
sowing seeds of inner peace
it’s changing me with humility
bowing to the rivers and trees
becoming all we were meant to be
in nature’s design we belong and trust
let’s grow this jungle of love and love and love and love

The song above is "Jungle of Love", written and performed by Tim Huang, inspired by the most loving farmers he knows - Hang and Chau.