Foraging a New Wilderness

"You look happy," I say to the stranger, but there is nothing strange about her. I have seen those eyes before, bright with joy. I have seen the haggard pilgrim lean on her cane. I have seen the tennis shoe-ed soul on the jogging path, or the sidewalk smiles, the hundreds, the centuries of gazes that meet mine and that well up with happiness, with wakefulness, with surprise at the dare in mine - do you see me?

"I am!" she says, and her accent is not Cuban, and her happy eyes follow mine. The humid dusk rests on her flushed face and my shoulders heavy with groceries. She puts a hand to her chest, "The Lord is in my heart!"

From a bicycle, a city of pretty much any size is a wilderness. Inhospitable streets bristle up like briars, and in them dwell adversaries armored in steel. Traps reach out to seize your wayward wheels, traps like hamburger joints and hotels with comfortable beds and swimming pools. In comparison, the quiet of forests and unclaimed, usually un-posted nature between those cities offer the truest hospitality.

Now, after about a month luxuriating in the forests, I find myself in Miami, a true city and certainly a true wilderness. As I pad along these sidewalks, and peer at the local members of this strange cement and credit card ecology, I am struck by the sustenance that I can glean even so. Sustenance like the smile of a stranger, and her resonance with what gives her meaning.

Pyrophoric Prophet

Pyrophoric:

-adjective

1. Capable of igniting spontaneously in air

"A good traveler has no fixed plans,

and is not intent upon arriving."

-Tao Te Ching

A good traveler can sit still. 

She can sit still while the path of her formerly fixed plan rushes past. Her plan surpasses her, and maybe continues to exist on wheels of its own rolling down the crowded, shiny Florida highway. 

Such a traveler was born about a week ago when my bike and I met Gary. We met him at his bike shop, where he mended a shipping wound, sold me lime green handlebar tape and a helmet, and told me that he had lost eight of his customers to accidents since he'd been working with bicycles and their humans in Florida. He told me that the state has the most bicycle rider fatalities in the country. And he told me all about his encounters with the foes of a human on a bike, from rednecks to fallen logs.

I resented it.

I thought, the man knows I'm going on a tour. Tomorrow. Because I told him. And he doesn't have the decency to withhold this injection of fear and anger, an injection so strong, as I stood there enraptured by his severe stories, that I could feel the adrenalin hot in my blood.

He was a signal. He was a pyrophoric prophet. A combustion of anecdotes capable of igniting at the touch of a single sentence. He was full of care and compassion, and he was full of fury and fright.

The combination enthralled me as the sun went down. When I left I was not sure whether to consider him a friend, or a loud echo of all the fears and excuses that anyone ever thinks up when confronted with the concept of a bicycle tour.

I was sure that the light was almost gone from the sky and that I would be late for dinner. Somewhere, flying along beside the rush hour headlights, bouncing up over cracks in the sidewalk, magically aware of the many movements of the mechanical world all around me, I thought two thoughts, also contradictory and combustible.

I love this.

And,

I don't want to do this shit.

That night I lay awake, trying not too look into the center of what caused the explosion. All that fear, that injection of adrenalin, would have meant nothing, if what I had been about to do had meant more.

I knew that what I was really afraid of was letting go of the plan.

But,

A good traveler has no fixed plans                                               

Montana Night

         

I arrived in Missoula afraid of the ghosts of last year. "This time last year," my mind chanted, I had mourned with my family the passing of a loved one. At the same time I had laid to rest parts of myself, and in their burial they made room for a new tide of uncertainty, fear, and sorrow.

I battled with this memory, even as I breathed in the Montana night. I didn't want to be back where I had been, and I frantically rifled through the past ten months; the shattered start, the sanctuary tucked in the blue hills, the salvation I found in dirt between my fingers, a garden in my belly, and the southern sun overhead.

I held them up, like evidence.

Don't these matter?! I yelled.

The Montana night only chuckled, and pulled me closer.

Now I stand on the other side of this perplexing orbit, knowing that my concerns were not unfounded. In some uncanny ways I have repeated this time last year. Every season is very alike its twins on the other side of the bulk that lies between, though we may try to make it different by clinging to this bulk, by waving around the linear narratives of our personal progress.

A book has come to me recently that helps put this conflict in context. The author, Paul Shepard, comforts me when he points out our "timeless instinctual compulsion to repeat" - and he doesn't just mean what it feels like to be a puppet in the hands of the holiday season.

He means that we as humans - who we are on a physical and psychological level, who we are before the modern environment confuses us with history and civilization - are beings with an innate sense of the cycles of nature.

This means that we are not just vibrantly aware of death returning, of winter descending, of our own inescapable habits. We are also aware of birth returning, of redemption and renewal. We have the patience to await it, the forgiveness to see ourselves through, and the joy to celebrate when it happens, as we knew it would.

That is what this Montana night has taught me.

In the midst of a cycle I felt helpless to stop, I found assertions of change and growth that are real and redemptive. Each new truth discovered has enough weight to tilt the balance and send my wheel of time spiraling on.

Speaking of wheels, my next bicycle adventure is arriving! This one promises Spanish moss, ocean breezes, and a happily anticipated stop at the Florida Earth Skills Gathering. More on this later...

And, lastly, to the tune of said holiday season, check out these earrings I made from that greasy old bike chain:

And pendants from my derailler:

That book I mentioned:

Shepard, Paul. 1998. Coming Home to the Pleistocene. Ed. Florence Shepard. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Drinking Socks, Chain Breakers, and a New Endeavor

I am having trouble writing this first post because my desk is covered in stuff! 

An apt introduction to my current mission:  

CLEANSE

What is this? This is release. This is GIVE. This is less is more and perfection, in a good way I promise. Ease is not a part of art and life is art and I am an artist. This is my project, this can be our project if you want to join me.

My goal is simple: Get rid of a lot of stuff. Keep track of the process, with pretty pictures and prose.

My goal is even simpler: claim my life. Claim it consciously, with intention and a light heart, with self love and laughter and gratitude for all the gifts over all these years.

This last mission will extend beyond this holiday season, and I hope you will follow me on the journeys yet to come, and the journeys already had, yet un-recounted.

Enough of that: Irish Drinking Socks, much more interesting subject. These are in fact from Ireland, purchased by a young yours truly when alcohol was still the realm of rockstars and relatives. Over the years they have accumulated hefty sentimental value, while thoroughly depreciating in foot-warming capability. Since one particularly memorable St. Patty's Day, I have long considered them satisfied in their life's purpose and content with a calm and detergent-scented retirement in my top drawer. 

But then I found this: http://themismatchedsock.com/

The website is as bold as it is cryptic. A poetic upheaval pivoting on socks, is about all I could discern, and was all the convincing I needed. At least one of my rebellious Guinness-slurping socks will participate - the other may be turned into a teddy bear, if that is possible...

The above bicycle chain has been with me for about 6,000 miles. (Epic story, poor form: it should have been changed after the first thousand or so). It carried me from the backyard of this house to the belly of the Arizona autumn. It carried me from the southern-most point of this country to the streets of Philadelphia. Essays, veggies, and dreams have wheeled around on the energy of this chain.

Now it is on the upcycle/gifting docket!

Destined to become earrings, bracelets... maybe even cufflinks. I am grateful to be able to share this piece of my adventures with loved ones! More photos pending as ornaments take shape.

Adventures Continue

As fond as I am of adventures that leave blisters on my feet, sunburns on my nose, and callouses on my hands, my adventure this last month was not one of those. On this sojourn I discovered and re-discovered, as usual. I mapped terrain I had not anticipated, and solved problems with tools that were only tangentially equipped for the task (such as using cell phones as lights for unexpected night boating, because it's not an adventure until something unplanned happens). I dedicated time and preparation, ventured forth aware of the risks and equipped with adequate armor (this time it was a pen and notebook instead of bear spray or spare bike tubes). I experienced a spectrum of emotions, from doubt to elation. November was a sincere adventure, and so was my exploration with novel-writing. Now, I get to write the rest of the story and plan the next adventures, within and outside of the written word.

Word Count: 53,291

Each Day, Each Word

As I whittle away at the words I haven't written, I find a curiously familiar phenomenon developing. As I click each letter down, or scribble it in my knuckle-wearing longhand, as my spelling errors and plot variables increase, as this story begins to say something, I find that I am asking what I loved about it in the first place.

And the answer is nuance, essence, the joy of using words to mean something vague and specific, probably not really to anyone else but myself. But, most good things are slaughtered in their making, art included, and writing included in that. We are bound to read only the hilarious ghost of the original idea. And then, of course, to re-translate it into our minds into another fully fleshed idea maybe capable of existing on the same plane as the first.

So, while my word count increases, I must confess to a sin - the sin of losing sight of the journey.

I understand that this writing challenge exists almost expressly for that purpose – to whip a bunch of pansy day dreamers into shape and stop them from griping about how haaard it is to walk the trail (are we there yet??). I certainly am not going to drop my daily word count just so I can sip tea and visualize one scene for three hours before meticulously crafting a few paragraphs that I am really happy with.

But what I have written I already look forward to revising. When? When I have time. When I have time to bravely type or delete what I am in too much of a hurry for now. Ah. Of course. That time. The revision.

In writing more so than in life we can count on editing. Maybe that makes it addictive. And maybe, as in life, that is neither true nor false, vice or virtue. I believe that each word, each day, each step are remarkably similar. It is not content or form. It is not journey or destination. It is all, and it is all art.

So far, writing this month has improved my opinion of all books, and of all of us.

Word Count: 22,533

From the Sky to the Soil

I know it's full of thought verbs and telling not showing and it will love to be edited, but I loved every minute of writing it and it deepened my understanding of this story. It's nice to focus on this, and remember my creative and competitive streak ;)  Also, I donated!

Word Count: 17,128