Sufficient

I don’t ask for much: only everything!

There’s got to be exuberance,  collective motion, and surprise, all wrapped in an enigma inside a riddle around a conundrum.

Or, a short bike ride will suffice.

One good thing about steep hills is  you can pack a lot more riding into a much shorter space.  When you go up and up, time, rather than distance, becomes the salient variable.

The yoga sages contend that a person only gets so many breaths in a life; that’s why there are techniques to slow the breathing; doing so makes you live longer.  Maybe the analogue is that there are only so many breaths you get on a Thursday night ramble; if you use them all up climbing, you’re done.

I don’t ask for much: only everything!

So when life offers less than I imagine, I need to see more of what’s there.

And then, I’ll notice, for instance, a classic rendezvous, an authentic hors categorie, and a bar that sells Rolling Rocks for just two dollars a piece.

That alone would suffice, and apparently did for those who went south.

For the north-facing group, though, there was more: a mechanical without incident, a route across the high bridge now made safer for riding and more difficult for suicide, and then, the crème de la crème, Fancy Fred’s best impression of Joeball’s wayfaring as we skirted the zoo along the so-called, and perhaps aptly-named “Elephant Path,” to much lower on Phinney Ridge than beforehand, but still worth it.

I don’t ask for much: just everything!

Adventure.  Self-inquiry.  Downhills that bring life to your senses.

And then, there was a long solo ride home, connecting up, ultimately, to just about exactly the spot I’d detoured on my ride from school to connect up.

Going in circles, sure, but they’re big enough ones that rather than repeating, you’re just never ending.

I don’t ask for much: just everything.

Life.  Eternal recurrence.  And eventually sleep.

Luminous

Photo by Joeball

One of the translations of the word “yoga” is “union; “yoga” which comes from a Sanskrit word that is almost a cognate of the English “yoke,” is about yoking together and forming a union between opposites like light and dark, good and evil, mind and body, the in-breath and the out-breath, and everything that is and is not everywhere and nowhere all in the same instant and for ever and ever.

Which is exactly what this year’s annual OMG Christmas Tree Fire ride was like as it combined the highest flames of the year with the lowest tide of the month to manifest a union of heat and cold, water and fire, bikes and booze, lies and truth, Dead Babies and live wires, all wrapped up under a moonless new moon evening with stars, believe it or not, on a January night in our usually gloomy Emerald City by the Sound.

tehJobies wore a silver fire-resistant space suit and made it rain fire and snow ash as he piled one more Christmas memory after another on the conflagration; at maybe a tree a minute for about two hours, I’d say a hundred to a hundred and twenty all told, most hauled by human power, at least from the brewery in Ballard.

Right at the bottom of the exhale, in the stillness before the inhale, or right at the top of the inhale, just before the exhale begins, that’s where yoga happens, they say, which is analogous, I think, to how you could find that perfect spot between being singed by the flames and frozen by the air but only by performing a kind of rotisserie action that spun you slowly around the circle, rotating and revolving like a planet about its star.

Embrace paradox: the colder it is, the warmer you feel; the darker the night, the lighter the mood; the more you drink, the soberer you become; less planning, finer results; many bikes, one ride.

Union.

Random

I believe in taking the nonsense seriously, so that means if your choice comes up, you might as well find a way to honor that outcome, even if the interpretation you would have put on it was different than everyone else understood it to mean.

That just goes to show you how difficult and surprising is human communication.

It was a somewhat lugubrious congregation on this off-week at Westlake so it seemed like an early bar made sense and, indeed, Georgetown turned out to be an excellent choice as it provided an apt destination for both the Lazy and the Bikeless and also treated me to an unexpected visit with an old friend from a different sphere, a kind of consilience that I always appreciate in whatever form it turns out to take.

I will forever wonder whether my chit was really chosen randomly from among that dozen or so slips of papers with possible destinations written on them, (although I did wrinkle mine up—which my friend who is a physicist and engineer assures me does increase one’s chances of being selected—so it may not be that suspect, after all) but since my words, “Home and to Bed” were the ones presented to me as where we were to be headed, (and since, as aforementioned, the dominant interpretation was that this meant my home rather than each of our own individual residences) the prudent course of action struck me as to interpret the situation in a manner that might still enable me to achieve the spirit of what I had suggested.

And so, it was probably this little bit of selfishness that led to my crash on the bike path. 

“Bridges May Be Icy” says the sign, one of which may be in my backyard, awaiting transformation into public art.

As much as it’s a shame not to win what you’d hoped for, isn’t it somehow more illuminating to get what you’d wished that you didn’t?