Gregory Scott Pettys - A Scholar Preserving Seeds

Many of my “aha”moments have come through grief,
yet modern culture teaches us to avoid it.
But I want to encourage you: face it.

█ Gregory Scott Pettys, Co-founder of Panya Forest

I come from the land currently referred to as the United States of America, I think it’s really the crux of amnesia and forgiveness. This so-called American Dream, this ideal, this epidemic of modernity that has now been globalized — it’s about trying to pursue a kind of elite relationship with something beyond nature. That mindset is very strong there.

But I began to feel differently through my travels — actually very suddenly — because of my relationship with Buddhism. That’s another story for another time.

It brought me to Tibet and other regions of Asia, where I came into contact with various Indigenous peoples and was exposed to land-based ways of living. Eventually, this led me to seed-saving — and Punpun, where I live now, is a seed-saving center.

▲ Gregory and his wife, Ramphai Noikaew (the one in the front row with palms joined), co-founded Panya Forest, where people from around the world can experience a simple way of life and engage in cross-cultural exchanges of traditional practices.

(Image source: Gregory’s Facebook)

Liberating Ourselves from “Head-Based” Knowledge

The big “aha” moment came when I was still a bit of an academic — now I call myself a recovering academic. With all due respect to academia, the problem I saw as a professional scholar was this: we study and intellectualize so many things, but what good does it do if it’s not embodied?

When I lived among these so-called “developing peoples,” they turned out to be the most intelligent people I’d ever met. As long as they had a sharp knife, they could get whatever they needed. Especially the nomadic peoples — they hardly needed any stored food; they knew every single plant and animal around them, and they interacted with them in sacred ways.

There was always a spiritual component. All of this — the intimacy with land, the intergenerational spiritual continuity — was something I didn’t have growing up in America. Everything there was in the head. Our relationship with the land, with ancestry, and with spirit had been severed.

That realization — that grief — was my awakening moment.

Coming from America, very few of us actually know where we come from. There’s little sense of ancestry or roots, whereas in places like Taiwan or other parts of Asia, there’s a strong connection. You know where you come from; you know your ancestors; you know your land. There’s a deep web of relations. You live inside a mythology, a story larger than yourself.

In America, we also have stories, but mostly politically constructed, manipulative narratives — not organic ones.

Travel, and as Daniel was saying, real face-to-face storytelling, helped me rediscover that sense of belonging.

So when I stepped away from academia — which I still respect and remain connected to — I wanted to return to something more grounded in lived story.

Punpun, where my wife and I work, is basically an unschool — a place of remembering. We try to bring people together to remember — to reconnect with what modernity has severed us from.

Searching for Lost or Endangered Words

I’d like to offer you two words, because I think language itself has a huge impact. The English language refers to almost everything in the sentient world as it. But everything is alive. In many Asian or Indigenous languages, beings are not “it” — they are she, he, we. They exist in relationship. That’s a very different worldview.

So I try to find lost or endangered words — what I call savers of wisdom — because we’re losing so much wisdom and memory in this time. You can often find riddles of truth within words.

The first word is hiraeth — from my Welsh ancestry — meaning “a longing for a home you cannot return to, because it no longer exists.”

That’s a profound truth of the modern world — the grief of knowing the homes we long for are gone. We must maturely recognize this and grow through it. As a seed saver, I struggle with another grief: 98% of the planet’s seed diversity has gone extinct in the last 40 years because of industrial life. We must come to terms with that — biologically, spiritually, and culturally.

So my question became: How do I find home, when I come from a people who ran away from a place they no longer remember? There is no ancestral memory of origin.
 

The second word is solastalgia — similar, yet distinct. It means the grief for what is happening to the natural world.

Maybe your grandparents have experienced it more deeply — talk to them. Ask, “Where was the forest you visited when you were young? Tell me about it — because I may never see it.”

Many of my own “aha” moments came through grief — which modern culture teaches us to avoid. But I would encourage you to look directly into it. Feel into the texture of that longing — for what your hands and your ancestral memory still know we should have, and what can be again.

That’s all I have to say about that.
 
Profile

With an academic background, Gregory lives with his wife, Ramphai Noikaew, in the Punpun Ecovillage in northern Thailand, where they accompany people from around the world in learning deep ecology, place-based living, and the possibilities of community coexistence.

He also collaborates with the cross-cultural experiential education organization “Where There Be Dragons”, guiding young people into places often overlooked by dominant historical narratives, yet very much alive. He places particular emphasis on dialogue and immersive engagement with Indigenous communities, hoping students will not rely on a single narrative to understand the world, but instead learn to reconsider the value and responsibility of being human through multiple perspectives.

◀ (Image source: Gregory’s Facebook)


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Gregory Scott Pettys - A Scholar Preserving Seeds

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Resource: Issue 512 of Humanity Magazine, Dharma Drum Publishing Corporation