The camel, the lion and the child

Riding the AZT 300 has represented for me, a series of complex wanderings upon wonderings. It's much more than the ride...it's always been about something else.....perhaps one day, it will just be about the ride. After my second DNF ended in a heap of salted sweat, cramps and puke; something subtle happened.

What is this, this life we seek? Is it the defined path we find ourselves upon, riding ever northward. Or is it the virgin grassy slope which wraps around our field of view; engulfing us in the harsh landscapes of our minds? 

Within this thought, I move forward in thirst, laden by the mass of water which I've carried for so long; sloshing around yet entirely forgotten. The trail writhes up and down, left and right, as a serpent in the hawks talon. It goes only one direction, yet turns every which way until it dives down forever........ 

The flowers along the path grow into the unrepentant sun; willing towards a higher place, away from the eroded fragments of yesterday. They display a power to create something for themselves.....I, take from it its beauty and am in turn, strengthened with a power......the power of wonder.....wonder which bends my reality....

The sunset on the first night, refraction en masse, bends much more within my self, my I.  It stops my legs from pedaling.... my dusty rotors squeal out into the calm desert night as my bike comes to a halt.  I pull  my camera from my pack and peer westward over the Santa Rita's through the viewfinder. "Click"......."Click"......"Click".......the sound of the shutter snapping open and close does violence to the silent night. The abrasive rustling sound of my pack fills my ears as I lower it to the ground....feeling the weight come off my back.  As I raise the camera to my eye once more....I pause, viewing the colors through that tiny glass....and lower my camera to my side.  I stand there, mesmerized....unladen. For what lasted just a few minutes, I watched the refractive show play out on a canvas of moisture in the atmosphere.....it is here I listened to the silence, uninterrupted by nothing but my breath.

I wheel off into the sunset taking care to watch the newly darkened path in front of me....my eyes still trained on the glowing embers of a blackened ridgeline.  As the sky deepens above and the fire fades from the mountain ridge, I notice movement from my left....fast.  Just above the tops of the grass, dark ghostly outlines appear out of the ink of grassy darkness beyond.....featureless shapes running towards me and across my path.   A pack of javalina spring in front of my wheel, disappearing back into the savanna darkness to my right....shortly after this moment, I lie down and fall asleep in the desert night to the sound of early summer crickets.

In the earliest light of dawn, I roll over on the rocky ground to find a weathered and bleached skull of a javalina roughly 3 feet from my head; strong, sharp tusks extending from its solid jaw.

On this new day, I no longer felt the weight of yesterday.  Such is the norm for a bikepack....the burden of the first day, driven out by the exhaustion and palliative peace beneath stars, is replaced by a new world.  On this landscape, I take from what is in front of me when I want.  I drink from the waters where I see fit, resting under the shade for longer than the previous day's self would have allowed.

Beneath the cottonwood trees, a symphony of rustling leaves play soothing sonnets to the wind, as I remember the previous days heat. The weight of yesterday and the path I rode seemed so long ago as I sat in the cool, moist sand next to the Cienega. The smell of a desert stream is like no other.....and I take it in, knowing full well that the protection of this oasis extends no farther than a few yards beyond the tree line.

My decisions at this point became clearer about riding the same path as I did the previous day.  More of yesterday, will I find today.....more ruins and memorials to the past washed from the desert, now gone, will I see. Yet as I ride off into the dryness and unaccommodating shade of the bajada, I no longer feel as I did previously. The race for me ends in Tucson. As I ride forward.....always forward.....my mind releases every bit of bondage I felt the previous day and I become lighter. I now ride for me and not for a goal I carried in the past.

In the weeks that follow, I contemplated this turn. I climbed high into the mountains and shared in the views which stretch forever over the desert I previously found myself.

 I peered upwards into the sky through the vanilla scented arms which warm in the sun.....

....and I watched as inquisitive children discover new games.....

Bones from the winters kill of deer, cast on the forest floor, now playthings for those who know nothing of burden. They write their own rules, and operate as an innocent and "self-propelling wheel"....tibia-fibula fragment in mouth.....

Upon waking in camp the next day, I peered outside my tent, upwards, into the alpine. As the clouds lowered in a soupy grey mass....I remarked to Staci that this is what the sky always looks like before a snow. As if on cue, the first snow flakes fell on us from above.....drifting slow at first, growing into a steady state of pea-like graupel and dendritic flakes.

Later that day, I return to a spot where the Spotted Coral Tongue Orchid and Rocky Mountain Iris grow, finding snow instead.....

Watching Graham play in the falling snow, we observe his inquisitive nature and child-like behavior.....how wonderful it must be to see the world through such a lens, constantly present and forgetting........

.....a reflection of us, captured in his eye.....and in his eye....we see the possibility of us, as the child.

Atonement for the Muse

Sea Change.....Pardigm Shift......Shit Happens. As a writer, I've benefited from a force that was everpresent and seemingly everlasting....until it was, no longer. I benefited in a strange way, from the pain and turmoil that roiled below the surface for nearly 3 years.....and then it stopped. What has torn me as a writer is that the source of this inspiration was pain, angst and dark visions that haunted me to the ends of sanity......so I rode away from them into a physical netherworld that gave me peace, tranquility......and in hindsight, an over-inflated sense of what the world was about.

I sit here writing about something I've now contemplated for the past 6 months. I am happy. As an artist with my background....this is a curse. I'm not bitter.....to be forward...I am ecstatic ....but I miss the cathartic flow of words that seeming gushed from my fingertips into the keyboard on a weekly basis......just a ride away from inspiration

I now realize some truths of happiness that I've struggled hard to realize.....this struggle has been harder than acceptance of death. When you think about this, it makes sense. You can't deny death.....especially when you find it laying there in all it's ugliness....alone....before the paramedics, firemen, policemen & trauma counselors show up. You can sure try to deny it.....but there is not a single neuron to be found in your mind that denies the simple fact......death just happened.

But.....you can deny happiness. As a writer, I've always felt I should be talking about things that are difficult. So in a way, I got lucky....if you can call losing your career of 13 years, your wife dying, losing your house and your dog....all in 6 months.....lucky. To put it another way.....I made lemonade from lemons.....really bitter lemons.....and I knew it, so I added a lot of sugar ....and my sugar was the one thing that very few people have ever been given......Time.

From this position I took the one weakness that the enemy of my happiness had, and I turned it against it.......Time......I had lots of it. I capitalize "Time" for a reason.....it is the one thing in our culture you can't sell and can't give as a person. Time happens independent of who we are.....we think we might control it, but we don't. I have it on good authority that time does not even exist....that it's merely a construct of the human mind......but I digress.

Time was my savior. For every injustice my personal emotions incurred....I had Time. To paraphrase Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, I had time to wait, to think and to fast.....and so I did....and I did it on my bike. I occupied a bike seat as the world fractured around me into a thousand tiny pieces.......I hear a person lied about his life fracturing into a tiny thousand pieces on Oprah and even sold a bunch of books, but I rode through it and just documented it on this blog....I never made a dime....but I did find a path through to the truth. What I realized in this process was that my will to survive was contingent on my ability to find beauty wherever it might lie.....and this is the bridge into my life as I now see it.....because as once before.....I find this is the only thing I can hold onto, however tenuous it may seem these days. Find the beauty......the grace will follow.

During the time before......I took pictures.....and I wrote.....I wrote about riding past exhaustion into sunsets that rose crimson into my emotions, lifting me from the morose of a tired day into the euphoria of a day spent seeking the beauty only to be found out there. At night, I lay naked and raw....but content.....viewing the cosmos above and alone.....but strangely happy. At dawn, I propped my head up on my backpack and viewed the coming day in all of its beauty. Never once on these trips did I experience the violent and sensory altering dreams I was encountering at home.....waking at night pacing and screaming until someone close to me would shake me lose....or I would wake. At no time in my solo trips into the middle of the desert, did I ever have trouble sleeping.....I found only peace, beauty....and grace.

It's with irony that I now find myself occupying seat 4a on a flight too and from from Washington DC, that I write this. I've struggled with the turn of my muse.....I no longer have a muse to claim. My muse for the longest time was my grief......and I grieve no longer......and yet I miss her.....my muse....not her. My muse was the source of a creative flow that was cathartic. Now, I realize that I must be my own muse. I must be the source of my own inspiration. I must drag myself from the comforts of modern society and place myself back out there. I must take a leap of faith.....and push myself past my ever shrinking boundaries of comfort.

We as writers have to hold ourselves to a higher standard. We are not the page writers of what always happens and certainly should not be just the tellers of the good times or the easy ones.....we must tackle the things that are difficult. For me, what is difficult is how to embrace this happiness I now find myself in. I found it easy to accept that my life before was a shrinking one.....a place where powers outside my control took things from me.....a place where my dreams were extinguished both in thunderous instances and tortuously long ordeals. I accepted this and after a time, I was fine with it. A very close friend of mine recently told me that for two years, I went Gollum.......I can't disagree.....because I was focused on a singular precious and let everything else go in the quest......what scares me now to no end is how easy it is on any given day, to let it all go and not care at all because I seek my precious.....my muse........

This is my atonement for the muse that gave to me such rich subject matter for such a long time.....I'm grateful for it....but good riddance you wonderful, creative, insightful bitch. You gave me beauty I could control and held it in front of my drunken nose long enough for me to appreciate, capture and write about it.....a beauty no creator could destroy because to destroy it would have been to destroy the creators creation. But now that you've left me, I'm glad......the horizon is clear and now I'm on the ocean of creative uncertainty once again......only this time....it's called happiness. We're all uncertain....and that's the way it should be.....with the winds of creativity tinted with a hit of the muse from time to time.....we just have to be sharp enough to capture that wind and run with it......

Arc

Coming down from the full effect of a week off is never easy....especially if one spends it eating and drinking their way through Paris over New Years.

From the colorful flower shops on the street corner selling spring buds.....

.....the locks above the river Seine symbolizing a love locked away.....

....the luthier shop passed every night on our way out into the city, lit brightly from within just off the metro stop next to our appartment...

....to the Pont Neuf bridging all of Paris history.

The milky brown waters of the Seine flow rapidly through this city carrying with it an arc of human history.

The vertical and palatial stature in every building, from the Louvre at sunset....

....the domes of Sacre Coeur on New Years Day...

...to the arching structures of Notre Dame and its flying buttresses at night; all contain a physical and metaphorical arc.

You can see this arc in the everday......Parisians taking communion at noon inside Notre Dame.....

....bathed in the colored hues from stained glass windows framed in an arch of stone.  

An angels shadow even rests upon an arch....set in stone and light as much as it is in darkness.

Written in stone, standing at the spot the guillotine served its capitol purpose; the 3200 yr old Luxor obelisk explains a past that most can't read....

....reminder that history here as in all places is constantly arcing from one pivotal event to another.  But unlike most places in the states...the human history arcs deep from the time of Pharaohs, the Roman Empire, the birth of Democracy and the exile of self proclaimed Emperors....the last of which is entombed beneath an arcing dome of gold at Les Invalides...spotlighted against the first sunset of 2013.

Everything in this city seemed to arc to something else, creating a focus on what came before and after; what was underneath and what was supported above.  Sometimes it seemed it was the very clouds that were hoisted above the city...pierced by the sparkling Eiffel Tower and adding a glow to the otherwise dark mist above.

From atop the Arc de Triomphe, the lights below in the streets create 12 radial swaths that pierce the darkness and create the city of light....red and white course through the city breathing life into her as I stayed focused on trying to capture the scene.

It was here I felt her hand press upon the small of my back and whisper in my ear, reminding me to aim a little higher this time to capture the yellow glow from the tower lights.....a glow that projected a whirling dervish above the Paris skyline....deep purple of the setting sky exposed for seconds at a time in the spaces the clouds had yet to fill.  The satisfying click-thunk of a 3 second exposure filled my ears...she liked this shot.  Click-thud, Click-thud.....small variations in F-Stop and film speed were tweaked providing for what was a growing conundrum....so many shots, so few words....her so beautiful.

I saw a dozen more shots from my perch there....but I walked away from my spot along the railing and turned towards her, looking into her smiling eyes. This was not the movie moment you see on the Eiffel....but it was our own, here on the Arc, in the cold winter mist of a lowering sky.  All I could see beyond the radial sprawl of brake lights and taxi cabs making their way up and down the Champs, were those eyes from the city of lights....bridging the gap between darkness and light.

Eyes that looked on as Parisians came to honor it's fallen at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier....an eternal flame protected by the arc above...

After a stroll down the Champs Elysées, we look back at the Arc to see the reflective glow of traffic and lights projected onto the smooth stone and rain...

A growing hunger began to gnaw at me.....how can I possibly tell this story, I asked myself....we had done our best to cover Hemingway's visible feast.....a veritable 'how to guide' for living....but well said and best left alone....

....watching the traffic go by at a cafe off of Bastille with drinks in hand; bikes and cars fly by early on New Years Eve.

We had walked all over the neo-gothic concepts of the city growing on top of the ruins of itself...Hugo's Paris has been so well-tread upon, I don't dare walk in his footsteps.  The Louvre with it's garish Pyramid hoisted onto the courtyard of the Palace...itself built atop the ruins of a fortress....it's laughable to think I can compete.

Should I say nothing and let the pictures speak?

It seemed trite at best and ignorantly futile at worst to even try to spill words on paper when so much has been said by so many exemplars of the written word.  Can't I just say Bonne année....happy 2013?

Perhaps my thinking about this conundrum of sorts, my struggle to explain the metaphorical arc of optimism growing in us as we initially threw our plates and senses to the city to fill....the culmination of New Years......followed by the patient and cultured descent towards our last day here....perhaps this IS the story!

As I descend from flight level 33 into Chicago O'Hare, I'm left with the feeling that I don't want to come down....I want to go back...I want to stay there on the arch, on that night, with those balmy clouds confining the rays of light in radial patterns which only converge on us.  High above Paris on an arch, bathed in the nexus of light and arc...my memory lives.

Don't play no game I can't win.....

I've flown a tight flight path these past two years based on sanity rules......and now..I'm doing what I want to do........

As I review this past year......it's a rebirth of sorts....a re-sorting of what I wanted vs. what I did to myself because I felt I had to......I ran long and solo because of the past....but I've found...I still want to run.....I want to run far and long.....but for different reasons.  Have I always wanted to run....will I always want to run??????

During this time of questioning.....I slowed down....I stopped driving at multi-day excursions in solitude....I was tired of talking to myself, in the midst of cholla and antelope squirrels ....I was tired of the ruse....I sought something tangible......

....I found a reflection that repeated back the same thing I asked....and thus I realized I had found the end of what I had sought.....the culmination of all the questions I had asked.....found, in the spot where I began questioning it all......a perfect mirror of the strife I fought to counter.  All this time....I was looking in the mirror trying to counter what I saw as my life....when all I had to do was look within at my own image to find the truth.

A truth that was too ugly to view or comprehend, I sought out a reflection of the truth.....an optical illusion....but the truth, none the same.  And yet, I became detached from it.....living now in a parallel universe.....a universe that came crashing down.....when my heart was confronted with the dichotomy of life.....one that is seen here......the soft focus of the grass on the horizon is countered by the near focus and sharpness of the grasses......and in the motion of the rider, a smooth violence floats above it....a narrow track of bare earth pierces it all...

Once I accepted this realization....that I was the same.....that my horror was temporary and my reality the same, I opened my eyes to what was invisible before.....beauty in love.....

It's a possibility that I had ruled out, completely......I did not, was not, willing to face it....and yet it came....

In spite of this.....I kept on riding off into solitude.....I laid down in the desert, looking up at the sky for the same epiphany that had met me every ride in the past year......and I heard nothing.....the sky held the same beauty....but no message....I begged the monsoon to roll over me as it had done before....and it obliged but this time; only with a cold and wet drenching......

Every canyon I turned up into and sat down and pondered....I found beauty.....but the wisdom I once found flowing was now dry......it was frustrating to find the roaring spring now dry.......

For a time I became angry......after 2 years, the insight that flowed seamlessly everytime I ventured into the wilderness now was absent......I grew furious at the fact that wherever I looked....I found nothingness......where I focused my attention.....I only found what I already knew......

So I threw this thought out of my mind and embraced the new spirit that surrounded me....

I hunkered down with old friends and ventured outside of riding to experience the music that encircles all of us.....

.....but I still fought the stillness.....I kept throwing myself at the silence....even harder......and the harder I threw myself at it, the more silent the void became....here I find myself, completely shelled after riding 40 miles where I, in the past, should have felt fine......I had another 30 miles to go.....my reasons for being here started to crack.......this was the omega of the past and the alpha of the new.....

Moving on......I embraced the alpha......and followed my heart.....and it's taken me away from the bike and back into the kitchen......

....surrounded by folks that want to eat, eat and talk about wonderfull things......why should this not be part of the wholistic experience?

I long ago learned to stop questioning why.  Why things happened....why life sucked....why someone had to die....why others lived.....why is the question you ask when you're unable to find a reason to live.....and live, I did.  I don't know why I don't feel the muse as I once did.....why I don't feel the need to drive towards the horizon as I once did.....but I know that I smile, and find smiles along my path....just the same.....

......and yet as I sit in Terminal B at Dulles Airport......my mind boils over with the thought that I should be out there on a bike....or ski...........peeling back the fog of a snowy day and embracing the first rays of sun to angle down from the eastern ridge above me........

I don't play no game I can't win.....this is just a tactical pause.......