Thinking on the charm of visiting some tiny mountain village, where tradition lives on and people live as they have for hundreds and hundreds of years. Goats. Chickens. Handmade things. This, I realize, does not appeal to me. The setting does, the natural beauty, the simplicity… but this is not the way. We can’t go back. Torri was interesting because it wasn’t back. Or forward, really. It was now. It was a group of people living the life they wanted to live in the environment they created. They were good to the land, they were forward thinking without being elitist or extreme. These communities are interesting. Tradition can be beautiful, but it is not my interest, and I think the big reason is that I feel they’d change if they could. This is linked in with the other reason I don’t want to visit places like this, that my tourist dollars will allow them to change, and they will do that, and so it’s gone. Also tourist dollars encourage certain kinds of changes, which I don’t like, but it’s more than that. It seems like development, while not inevitable, is nearly universal in its path. Everywhere capitalism comes people follow the same path. And there are rare exceptions, and it is these exceptional people that build purposefully different communities, and this is what appeals to me. Because they had a chance to follow the path, and turned away. It’s not that they haven’t seen it, it’s that they turned away. My money brings no danger. They’ll use it to further their own path, not progress down the usual one. And this is also why, I think, I consider monasteries somewhat an exception. I feel that they will use my money to follow their own path, not the usual one. Because they’ve made purposeful choices about their community, and though I may not agree with their reasons or their path, at least it is something from the current norm.