In the middle of March, having been in the Czech Republic for nine months, I was invited to participate in a traditional springtime procession in a tiny village in southern Moravia. A straw man was to be carried from the village square down to the river, set on fire, and then tossed into the water; green branches would be gathered, decorated with ribbons, and returned to the square. All of this was in the name of dismissing winter and welcoming the return of spring. When we arrived in the middle of the cold gray afternoon, we joined a small group of parents and children and began marching to the river, singing Czech folk songs all the while. But I was misled about this being a traditional procession: At some point it was admitted that Czechs haven't enacted this ceremony for a hundred years or more. I was part of a re-creation, an attempt to resurrect an old tradition that had died out generations ago. I discovered later that the group of people marching down to the river were Waldorf school moms and dads, and that this was a Waldorf event. Waldorf schools were imported from the West in 1995 or so.

I was tremendously disappointed, but I couldn't quite say why. Was it just the tourist in me, disappointed by the lack of quaint costumes? I recalled a wine festival I had stumbled upon the previous autumn in the village where I live, when the participants had been dressed in the traditional Moravian lace-and-embroidery-embellished garb. They started performing traditional songs and dances, parading through the streets of the village joined by a small marching band and a group of men pulling a red wagon that held a big decanter of burčak, an enticingly sweet midpoint on the journey from grape juice to wine. They poured glasses for the folks watching along the sidewalk or from their lace-curtained windows. I noticed that I was the only foreigner there, in fact, probably the only person not from the village itself, and this produced a wonderful feeling of satisfaction at the authenticity of it all.

So why the disappointment at those real Czech folks marching down to the river, trying to resurrect some bit of their heritage, even if many could not remember all the words to the songs? The urge to resurrect old traditions is here, as everywhere, a reaction to the ever-accelerating pace of life and the fear that one's own way of life is being consumed by the global behemoth of instant glitz, pop culture, and convenience. In a country that just 15 years ago was dominated by secret police, closed borders, and banana lines, things are changing quickly and people are in a hurry to make up for lost time.

My disappointment, it turns out, was at being confronted with my own naivety. I had moved to the Czech Republic in hopes that I could learn something from a people who had had no choice for so long but to define themselves by other means than what they could afford to buy. Instead I found many of them eager to acquire as many as possible of the vices of the West. The march down to the river was a response to that, an unglamorous act of real people trying to do something real for themselves, trying to create meaning where meaning is in danger of slipping away.

On my cynical days, the growing Czech hunger for the consumer lifestyle suggests that human nature longs for little more than cool stuff to buy; real and meaningful traditions seem only to survive as long as people are prohibited, whether by circumstance or design, from having enough shopping opportunities.

On other days, however, I catch glimpses of an entire nation rallying to redefine itself after centuries of being ripped apart and resewn by the hands of various would-be empire builders. They are hard at work rebuilding their social institutions and public infrastructure, trying to purge the last whiff of totalitarianism from their souls. In effect, they are redesigning their society from the bottom up, and a necessary part of that is to resurrect old traditions. How else to remember who they were? The enthusiasm and success of their effort suggests far more convincingly that the fabric of human nature is truly resilient and durable stuff.