A harmonious relationship creates joy. It is a bond free from attachments to power, money, or status. Accept your friends and partners as they are and release all judgment.
Zhang Fei Kingdom of Shu.
Three weeks into my stay with the Montagnard tribe and I was up to my knees in mud and stone. I helped repair a stream dam used as a reservoir that fed water into the village using bamboo and an old fire hose for pipes. Water was constantly needed to grow rice, irrigate crops, and supply the village with fresh water to cook, drink, and bathe.
Manual labor always made me happy for some unknown reason. To this day, I love shutting off my head and just doing something worthwhile with my hands and minimum headwork. I felt like I was creating something when my hands were busy, and in the example above, it helped sustain the village’s lifeblood. Without a steady supply of clean water, the village would be forced to pack up and move—no easy task, but not an unknown event in their lives.
On that muddy, stinky, sunburned, and joyous day, Ms. Yang made her grand appearance. She arrived on foot with two happy pot-bellied pigs, a few geese, two goats, and an entourage of porters carrying tools and supplies in backpacks of woven twigs that looked like deep conical baskets.
The village gathered around her and escorted her into the central quadrangle formed by the longhouses. In the center was an old gnarly tree with a bench that circled the trunk. The tree was a leftover shamanistic relic of the past and served as a meeting place in the shade. It represented the soul of the tribe, its longevity, and continued prosperity.
The work party kept working, and I was reluctant to abandon them to take my nasty self up to Ms. Yang and introduce myself as the guy she would be living with all alone in the jungle. Pete appeared anxious to finish and greet his friend. He stayed, and we worked on repairing the dam before the rainy season started.
Here, I’d like to take the opportunity to introduce Ms. Yang, or Anne, as I will call her. Backstory bloviating is a sin worse than flatulence in an elevator, but I thought I’d just get to the point instead of building suspense throughout this stream-of-consciousness memoir.
My partner was not a striking woman of beauty often seen in the cities in a long white dress with split sides. She wasn’t short or skinny either. Anne instantly drew my attention with her freckling across the bridge of her nose and under her eyes. The freckles looked like tears caked in the red-brown dust of the trail. It was apparent that she was a mix of Vietnamese and caucasian. Her hair was dark brown and thinner than indigenous women’s. She had the muscular body of a woman that had worked at hard labor, yet her skin was fair and smooth as a polished river rock. Anne towered over the village women, and they knew her and admired her.
Over time I would find out that she was the daughter of a Vietnamese mother and an American father, a soldier. He died in the war, and the mother remarried after the reunification of the north and south. The father could not accept Anne, and she was taken to a Buddhist orphanage by her mother and abandoned.
Anne grew up under the monks’ teachings and, when old enough at 13, began to work with the monastery outreach serving the poor and sick. She proved herself an apt devotee, and while not able to be accepted as a monk, she dressed in the plain robe of an assistant and shaved her head. At 20, she was sent to college to learn French, English, and Latin and, after two years, transferred to Botany. She told me she saw the path to contentment in the plants surrounding us.
Thirteen years later, here she was. Anne was considered a lost woman unfit for marriage and children because of her age. She had not assumed the shame of her past, nor did anyone whose life she touched consider her lost or unlovable. Anne had accepted her life as it was and was so self-sufficient it was hard to believe she needed anyone for any reason. Her greatest joy was sharing her love of nature with anyone who would listen with the desire to learn. I was her captive audience, and part of this rambling tale is about what Anne taught me about life philosophy and the connection with nature. She turned my intrinsic love of nature into a way of life. She taught me about the many virtues of love and kindness and how love is a mutable yin power like water.
The day I looked up from my labor, my fashionable loin cloth no longer new or foreign to me, I arrived at a divergence in my life’s journey. I would realize that opposites, such as good and evil, hot and cold, and love and hate, would all be necessary experiences to give my life balance and never choose one over the other. A life lived just off-center was the most rewarding, and I was much more than my animal instincts mutated by the warrior ethos and modern lifestyles.
Anne also taught me that true love and intimacy have nothing to do with sex. I’ll expand on this transformation journey one step at a time. Anne and this mission were just one of many that acted as masonry stones where I built my internal mansion and spent most of my days.
Hyperion Sky 
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