I have been on the road riding across the country on my bicycle, “Anam Cara”, for 32 days, I think. This is my first Starbucks day since I left Bastrop, Tx. , where I sit and phone folk and take a few notes and plan a little.
I’m not blogging this trip in the usual manner of a bicycling man-I’m more doing this for space and life review via encounter and getting away from the familiar. I don’t think this is a necessary adventure for all, and many times I’m not even sure it’s for me, yet-I am doing it this way to encounter the illusion of security one can make up by the time of your 66th birthday.
As good example of the available lessons waiting for me out there came yesterday in a stoplight intersection in Las Cruces, NM. I was stopped in left hand turn lane waiting for the familiar green turn arrow, when low and behold i got a green arrow plus a red light? What and which one do I do-I froze in bewilderment with a fully packed touring recumbent bike with a line of cars behind me. I soon found out which light I should have responded to by a young Mexican man in a truck behind me gave me a tongue lashing in Spanish, then to make sure I understood said, “hey you got to be a ignorant——– –“! I disagreed immediately, I could be a confused ___________ or slow, or other options…anyway, I got my butt and bike to the sidewalk till I could recover from the confusion and the panic brought on by one of my fellow humans. I know which light to follow in New Mexico now–I’m better for it.
On a bicycle in a foreign city folk don’t know your wealth, your family, your work status –they just suspect you are on a mission or adventure of some kind that doesn’t include the normal definition of efficiency.
“And a man or woman must leave his mother and father”.
Jesus
[those things for me that I would project onto so as to avoid the moment given-I graciously get one moment at a time-“Cloud of Unknowing”, 1400’s.]
The times I would have turned and return to the familiar farm I rode off from, I find myself impossibly to far away to turn around. I pedal on tomorrow after the wind forecasts leave the “gail warning” status for a more tolerant wind speed. This is the 2nd time I have been sidelines for wind strength along with blowing sands in “my face direction”.
I always wanted to travel across the USA by the power of my own body. That is all grand and noble when you haven’t ridden off. After you ride off and diarrhea and weakness hit you, the reality of the ride comes home. Then the unexpected comes in the middle of one night somewhere in a dead west Texas community—it’s the deepest of homesickness, the malignant aloneness that comes best when sleeping on the ground near the Void, a place unseen with the mind, but sensed with the body.
So it never seems to fail, when I pedal off in the mornings-things are new….
Spiritual Formation 