?

I don't think anybody can go to a third world country and have it not challenge one's definition of everything, of happiness, of wealth, of the contours of what we consider to be real.

How is it that the Comalapan people seem more genuinely happy then the average American Joe or Jane despite of the poverty and mud and trash and work from grade school age until your back is the same shape as a crescent moon?  It's not poverty in their minds, it's poverty in my mind, relative to what I consider to be the definition of poverty and wealth, a horribly anthropocentric tendency I have to hurl these concepts onto everything I see.  And what are these things, poverty and wealth?  Is it only in relation to finance?

The Comalapan people, from my experience don't attach the latter to the former.  Their concepts are simple, un-muddied and elegant and their happiness is not connected to any of the parts that make up the whole of the definition of any word resembling wealth.

Every aspect to their lives is at the core of experience.  Experience itself, the thing done and ingested.  It happens and is taken in and that's it, no analysis paralysis, no preconceived notions or expectations to skew the outcome of the experience.  A kid falls flat on his or her face and gets up to shake it off, no over-comforting from the parents, the experience is done and over with, no need to add extraneous baggage and dependency to it afterwords.

Conversations are at a genuine and real as rain level because there aren't any abstract or over thought players in the conversation.  The conversation turns into a conversation akin to talking to a peacock without getting lost in the iridescence of it's wings and finding out it's inner most basic all sharing and simple qualities by looking at it in the eyes.  Kind of a stretch but it works.

With our technologic development, like out of a movie about the future made ten years ago, with our university and medical systems, with all these glittering perks of a first world country, with all our delicious drugs and some mind altering athletics, there is something inside and universally muddied to the point where it, the most instinctual of Homo sapian shared qualities, is lost.  Gone.

And at what cost.  Everything is relative to what you know and understand.  The curse of knowledge.  The curse of the tortured genius, with the opening of avenues of thought comes vulnerability to their destructive capabilities of hurting something that was not there before the avenues were opened in the first place.  The more you know, the more you know you don't know anything.

Another core gut like need share by everyone under air is companionship and community, with it's microcosm found in the family.  Rugged individualism has dynamited this emphasis on family, the building blocks to any notion of community, into a pile of shrapnel.  Think for yourself is as necessary as a good beer, but to much can make you look like you swallow pumpkins for breakfast, lost jobs, and body dented couches, and just enough - not only tastes great but can lead to a productive buzz.

But, I have to use these sort of opaquing abstract concepts to write and say everything I just said.  To make order of the cultural differences I have to diffuse and deconstruct and add more floating and possibly irrelevant concepts to create a definition that I can not only write, but chew and swallow and actually enjoy the taste.

So much for that.