Backwards...... Today we are leaving Vietnam and it's feeling like the end of the trip. We are still going to Japan then flying to Vancouver and road tripping home but that all seems a bit proforma, like a weekend getaway. You might be thinking Japan, proforma? I am anticipating that I will like much of Japan and also will be surprised by some of its aspects, but I also know it will be safe, polite, modern, and, dare I say, a bit pasteurized the way all first world countries have become.

Hopping from country to country, culture to culture, in a short time span has clarified some things that previously my mind had flitted around but never grasped. Early on, when I was learning to read, I had a primer that described a happy village. A care free boy on a perfect summer's day greeting the milk man and the garage mechanic as he bopped about town. This book instilled in me an image of the way life should be which I still hold dear. On this trip I have seen that my vision was not just childish romanticism. My happy village is out there in the jungle, on the edge of the desert and high in hidden mountain valleys.

The rubes, hicks and yokels of the world know something we don't. Their hands are leathered and their backs bent, but at the end of work they squat at the side of the road, immersed in wordless comradary and drink in the world around them in silent peace. They rarely take for granted the sounds of their children, the simple roof over their bed or the rice they nutured and grew. In the west we have so many idioms to disparage these people. Well I can tell you, these stone age basket weavers are far ahead of us and our cult-of-self in many ways.

There are a number of ways these people are different from us. They do not easily take affront to things and people. They laugh readily and tend to accent the positive. They want things but when things do not work out they easily shrug it off. Perhaps most importantly they spend about a tenth of the time thinking about themselves that most "modern" men do. Concepts of self actualization and existential angst are unknown to them. I think this is because, to them, the line between self and village is a blurry one. Whether due to their inter-dependence or their long cultural legacy, the "simple" people of the world have achieved a grace of living rarely seen in the globalized world.

Wait you say, these people suffer, they lack access to modern medicine and good schools for their children. They work long hard hours with little to show for it and then, the final indignity, they die young. All true to an extent but as they live their shorter lives there is a qualitative difference. They know the score from an early age. That is why their children work hard and happily for the family and rarely sucomb to sullen isolation. It is also why they are not haunted by death. When your father dies you miss him but it is natural. Death, like the monsoons, is just a part of everything. The casual acceptance of death frees the mind to the present. It opens you to feeling the rain in the breeze and the smell of the wood fire which beckons you home.