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.