Category Archives: Conservation

Waking up to the beauty of movement

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“I love the sensation of movement”  –Ned Overend on why he rides, from Outridebike.org

Last evening the fragrance of the forest rolled down the mountainside into town where it filled my senses. On my bicycle today I follow the trails up into the origins of those smells, the beautiful evergreen forest canopy gracing the mountains, in the shadow of the rainfall.  Evidence of last night’s rain is all around, banks of sand washed over the ground in rippling forms, still trickles of water braiding in rivulets beading down the barks of trees and through all the meandering canyons, infusing the air we breathe and carried on the wings of the breeze.

Roots Farm Cafe in Tijeras, NM is delicious before, during, or after a ride

I’ve been waking up to the beauty of movement lately, thinking of all the special places I can go on foot and on bicycle.  I don’t take that for granted anymore.  Especially as I see more people take up the habit of exploring our world and being healthier and living life via walking and cycling.  There is nothing more beautiful to me than people out moving naturally on the earth.

A favorite destination is the High Desert, where I can practice finesse on my ‘road bike’ and get a feel for the land

“Enlightenment is not some good feeling or some particular state of mind.  The state of mind that exists when you sit in the right posture is, itself, enlightenment.” –Shunryu Suzuki

I think there are many ways to go places in this world, and just like love can be expressed in all vocations from farming to carpentry to management, we can tune in and pay attention whether we are moving, on foot, car, truck or bike, or standing still.  But for me the bicycle has been revolutionary.  Cycling extends my range but manages to keep me connected at a human scale.

I love cycling up a climb like La Luz. Even though I’m moving, my mind stands still and I become concentrated on my breathing.  I’m like a swinging door, breathing in, breathing out, aware now I’m interdependent on the oxygen in the air.  I have to work at the pedal stroke, but somehow that relaxes me.  Two legs make one motion.  When I get to the top of a climb satisfaction flows into me. Somehow my thirst is quenched.  I feel replenished. From home I climbed up into the mountain light.  I receive insights and perspective.  And I can turn around and draw a line with my bike, a connecting thread back to my home. We need movement like the Earth needs water.

Almost monsoon time

“That is why Buddha could not accept the religions existing at his time.  He studies many religions but he was not satisfied with their practices.  He could not find the answer in asceticism or in philosophies.  He was not interested in some metaphysical existence, but in his own body and mind, here and now.  And when he found himself, the found that everything that exists has Buddha nature.”  –Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

As I reflect on all the people pedaling around our city environs, and realize there is a mixed record of land uses and varying impacts on environmental quality we experience while cycling, what Barry Lopez had to say in his book Horizon gives me a hopeful perspective.  The fact that today exists means there is hope now.  And even in these landscapes that have been altered so severely, often times for only one reason, the possibility still exists to see things whole and in the big picture.  There is still a lot to work with in the here and now, and all the time in the world to create our next dreams.  Every time I go for a ride, or see other people moving with natural grace, I feel like I am part of that, like I’m experiencing today the original creation, unfinished and ongoing, unfolding like a a flower.  When I’m on my bicycle I feel open to all this.

“Even in this logged-over landscape, soaked and gleaming, contradicting the apparent desolation of the clear cut, where stillness now accompanies the silence, I can imagine something like the original creation however mythic that thought might be.  Or the blueprint of another creation, unknown and unplanned” (Barry Lopez, Horizon, p. 129)

A young cyclists pedaling in to Bike-In Coffee at Old Town Farm, one of Albuquerque’s unique gems off the Bosque Trail

I’m really grateful for the bicycle.

“Keep Moving”  –Grandma

Home trails

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Humanity
has been sleeping
–and still sleeps–
lulled within the
narrowly confining 
joys of its
closed loves.
–Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I love exploring Albuquerque’s Open Space on urban trails.  Our trails put me in touch with the healing powers of nature.  The trails are often times small, and that can bring trail users into close proximity.  That gives us opportunities to contribute to well-being in a neighborly way.

The best kind of trail in my opinion is singletrack.  This is even more challenging to share than a small two-lane road, where a person may take up a whole lane, but there is still another lane to pass providing you can see it is clear of oncoming traffic for the necessary distance.  When you meet another person on singletrack, you have to negotiate a safe pass, because by definition there is only room for one line of traffic.  This always requires communication, patience, awareness of and respect for the well-being of others, and restraint by the speedier users.

One day on a singletrack trail in High Desert, I got stuck behind a couple walking and talking.  They were going in the same direction I was.  They had two dogs off the leash.  I said hello and that there was a bicycle behind them.  They didn’t hear me or see me.  I kept a safe distance behind them and waited until there was a pause in their conversation, and used a louder voice to try saying hello again.  On the third or fourth try they heard me.  I stopped and waited as they gathered their dogs and attached the leashes to the collars.  They found a safe place to move aside and when they were set they waved me on.  We exchanged smiles and greetings with remarks on how beautiful the day was outside.  It felt so good to share pleasantries.  By taking time I made new friends.  I felt like my patience paid off, not only in waiting for them, but the feeling I got inside from negotiating a safe, friendly pass contributed to my own well-being.

Our situational awareness as travelers takes into consideration the well-being of others.  It is not just about going somewhere, it is about being with people in places and safeguarding dignity.  In our travel culture I sometimes see an atmosphere of incessant rushing.  And in traffic engineering, there are metrics such as travel speed and throughput that stress industrial measures that can overshadow human needs such as community, enjoyment and quality.  The trails are a good place to get back in touch with ourselves and forge those vital connections once again.  It takes discipline, but when we focus our attention there, good things happen.

In Colorado Springs, the Garden of the Gods offers trail opportunities for exploring the land

An important mentor of mine for teaching youth cycling told me that kids don’t get “yield”.  It is kind of a complex word.  He found that it works better to teach kids to “give it up” when they see other people on the trail, at junctions, or crosswalks.  This works well, being present to the needs of others.  This also includes horses, which are common on New Mexico trails.  In that sense, the rules for urban trails teach us to give it up and be present to all of life in nature. By doing this, we experience a fuller measure of nature’s healing powers right here on home trails.

Finding our way home

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“What is it that awakens in my soul when I walk in the desert, when I catch the scent of rain, when I see the sun and moon rise and set on all the colors of the earth, when I approach the heart of wilderness?  What is it that stirs within me when I enter upon sacred ground?  For indeed something does move and enliven me in my spirit, something that defines my very being in the world.  I realize my humanity in proportion as I perceive my reflection in the landscape that enfolds me.”  –N. Scott Momaday, Testimony, 1996.

Following Mai up the Spruce Spring trail in the Manzanos

We’ve had a good series of adventures since I last wrote.  I’ve been to the Iron Horse Bicycling Classic in Durango, and enjoyed bike rides and walks with Mai in sweet places.  So far as figuring out where home is, I think that is a trick question.  I feel at home everywhere I am.

Mai cycling near Lemon Reservoir

Feeling at home is a matter of paying attention.  When we tune in we sense it.  In Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way, she says “the reward for attention is always healing.”

Following my teammate around the Sandia Mountains

roses in front of the Hillerman Library

A cactus flowering on top of the Manzano Mountains!

Cameron goes on to say “your own healing is the greatest message of hope for others.”  This seems to me true.  And it a whole lot easier than trying to fix problems we don’t control.

Enjoying a slow roll up the mountain on the back road tucked away behind Placitas

Cooling off after the Ironhorse in Silverton

Hidden waters in the canyons of the San Juan Mountains

I enjoyed being in Durango, but it was also nice coming back to Albuquerque.  There is a lot of nature in this place, and we do well to experience it, to go with the flow.  It is ironic that people need nature to recharge and recover, but sometimes the way we build up the environment covers up this healing power.  It seems like where we need that the most is where all the people are (or most people, and now across the world, over 50% of people live in cities, and that proportion is growing).  Sometimes I feel alienated from humaneness in parts of the city, and that causes pain.  Julia Cameron wrote “pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention”.  That is an important lesson.  Building places, working with nature, so that we feel connected to all of life feels a whole lot better, and it’s worth the effort.  When people feel a sense of adventure in routine activities, enjoying simple things like a walk or bike ride, we are living well.

On most road rides I meet people

Sometimes the beauty in the mountains helps us get back on the right path and reminds us life is an adventure

The sun shines today also

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“When you’re born to run, it’s so good to just slow down.”  –Steve Winwood, Back in the High Life Again

Since I started cycling everyday in 1997, the original attraction–the insight of the bicycle as a transformative tool–keeps getting stronger.   I’ve learned that in spite of my love, there is no bike friendly paradise out there that already exists for us.  We have to build our own world.

Rules to govern power differentials in spatial relationships is key for encouraging more walking and cycling.  IMBA (the International Mountain Bicycling Association) offers a simple principle for the trails to direct respectful relations.  “Descending riders yield to climbing riders.”  ( https://www.imba.com/ride/imba-rules-of-the-trail ) With speed comes the responsibility to control it.  On roads, the LAB (League of American Bicyclists) has a similar principal governing orderly flow of traffic.  It’s called “First come, first served.”  “Everyone on the road is entitled to the space they’re using.  If you want to use someone else’s space, you must yield to whoever is using it.”  ( https://bikeleague.org/content/traffic-laws ).  Education is one part.  Instilling the discipline to apply these principles is another.  Policies prioritizing safety over speed are mechanisms.   Safety is a mindset based on self-respect and respect for human individuals.

Prioritizing safety over speed is based on recognizing our limits as a species. We evolved in nature for slower moving activities.  Mechanical assistance brings in a level of responsibility we are not automatically equipped to handle. So training and knowledge becomes essential.  Nature shows us we have biophysical limits.  Travel systems such as the Shinkansen, or Bullet Train, in Japan have achieved an admirable degree of fast transport and system safety by controlling variables.  To keep using our roads and trails with a high degree of autonomy and freedom, we have to implement principles, and be disciplined and restrained to protect people.

To achieve the outcome of a transportation system with all kinds of choices, and safety and dignity for all, we have to focus on the process of following basic principles.  I think we have a head start in America since the idea of respecting the individual is so strong and powerful, and we also want people to set out and explore our country.  It seems a vital necessity.  If we focus on the process and applying what we know, it feels so good to slow down and enjoy life everyday.

“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.  Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”  –Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance.

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Home

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“We must go alone.  I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.”  –RW Emerson, Self Reliance

“The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lessons of worship.” RW Emerson, Nature

One of the truest aspects of cycling is the way it connects us to the soil again and helps us put down roots in the places where we are growing our lives.  Cycling helps us find our way home. It’s a technology that helps us notice when we are happy, and shows us how simple the joys in life can be, how direct and integral the connections between the land, water, air, all of nature, the whole community are to sensing a greater awareness of who we are and what we can be.

I think with all the fancy technology we have there is a tendency for arrogance, for pretending we know more about life than anyone else.  But as Kurt Vonnegut points out in his talk called the Shape of Stories, we really don’t know anything more about the central mysteries of life than before.  This is what Emerson referred to as the equivalency of all times.  There is an equality inherent throughout humanity.  It is this humility and understanding our limits that keep us innovating at our best, with the aim of enjoying life on the only home we know, planet Earth.

“I have tried to bring scientific thinking to literary criticism and there’s been very little gratitude for this.”  –Kurt Vonnegut, Shape of Stories

And so on this Earth Day, I took a ride on lunch break.  The butterflies are flying about in the winds, caterpillars are crawling on the ground and on flowerstalks, and the hummingbirds are arriving in town.  It is just another day on this earth like any other day, which means today is magnificent, special and holds the complete history of time, all of the present, and the seeds of the future.  It’s a great day.  A nice day to take a stroll or a bike ride, and keep finding our way.

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence…It destroys his own inner capacity for peace.  It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”  –Thomas Merton quoted in Rick Bass, The Blood Root of Art

References:

Kurt Vonnegut’s talk Shape of Stories can be viewed on YouTube here since you probably can’t listen/watch it while “reading” this blog post and listening to Clapton and Winwood playing, but it is worth a view, as Vonnegut can tell a good story about storytelling.

Why cycling is a symbol for uplifting all of humankind:
https://bikeyogiblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/cycling-and-walking-to-get-our-bearings/

The Thomas Merton quote, via Rick Bass, appears in Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data edited by Scott Slovic and Paul Slovic

“Spring Sunlight” from Sansai Studios

Bike rise

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I swing my right leg over the saddle, guide my shoe cleat into the pedal, and hear the affirmative click of the engagement reverberating through the quiet morning air.   I hold onto the handlebars and push on the pedal.  As I start rolling forward towards the daylight streaming in over the eastern mountains, I feel something like laughter bubbling up on the inside.  I’m headlong for adventure.   I’m off on a bike ride.

I feel the air current flowing over my wintry silhouette.  As my breathing naturally synchs with the circular motion of my legs, my consciousness moves from my head into my heart.  My heart is now guiding me and I think of the mantra chanted at the green tea ceremony in Santa Fe.  Open your heart.  Open your heart.  And there I am in the moment living a scene maybe no one sees, swooping through the currents of chilly winter air, the life inside of me shining out on this quaint street.  All seems quiet and mundane, just me and the bike rolling.

Bicycling on the campus of New Mexico’s flagship university in Albuquerque, art catches my eye

I didn’t intend it this way, but so far I’ve spent a lot of my life on the road.  Much of it moving so fast, boxed in behind windows, scenes flying by on a scale exceeding my human senses.  The bicycle has helped me relax more and enjoy being in the moment.  And much like William Safford’s poem Maybe Alone On My Bike suggests, on the bicycle, rider and poet become one.

my teammate Eli gliding up the mountain in Utah’s Crusher in the Tushars

When climbing mountains, we experience a suffering that is cathartic and brings us closer to an experience of ecstasy.  On grinds up long grades we sometimes feel bogged down.  Then we rise up out of the saddle, and call down to the engine room for more.  Sometimes we find something inside ourselves we didn’t know we had before.  Climbing mountains can be purifying in a way, as we learn to let go of negative emotions and overcome our self doubt. When I am suffering on a mountain climb I focus my mind on a singular thought:  Just keep going, keep my motor spooling, my chain connecting my drive to the wheel and to the ground.

Horses we see in Placitas remind us to be free

The bicycle shifts the normal feeling of separation we feel with motorized travel to a sensation that we are more a part of the landscape.  Cyclists are insiders looking out.  We meet nature on its own terms, with our own nature driving us forward.  Cycling connects us with life’s splendor.

On a group ride in Gutierrez Canyon in the East Mountains, which used to be a dirt road

It’s not that bicycling is the only way.  Technology has widened our perspective.  We can be immersed in the physical world, such as when we swim.  We can walk or bike and move at human scale over the earth’s surface.  Traveling in cars gives us the ability to see contrast at the landscape scale, big changes from river valleys, plains and mountains, which we traverse more easily and swiftly.  Air travel gives us a kind of patchwork quilt perspective.  Space travel has given us a picture of Earth’s uniqueness in the Universe.  These five perspectives are almost like a five storied pagoda.  But as Wendell Berry wrote, “we cannot live in machines”.  When I pedal my bicycle the chuckle of the chain tells me this is a happy median to be in.  The story of the bicycle is a machine metaphor I can live with, because we are the drivers.  I marvel at our ride.

Congratulations to the Semper Porro team for their teamwork in Valley of the Sun 2019. Poetry in motion!

When people come together on bike rides, we have an entirely different experience of the city

Sometimes bicycling is more fun than you would imagine possible

onward and upward

bike rise

References:
The William Stafford poem this blog entry is based on is reprinted in this post:
https://bikeyogiblog.wordpress.com/2018/09/03/all-of-us/

Wendell Berry’s quote is from his excellent The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, “The Use of Energy” chapter.  Full quote:  “The catch is that we cannot live in machines.  We can only live in the world, in life.  To live, our contact with the sources of life must remain direct: we must eat, drink, breathe, move, mate, etc.  When we let machines and machine skills obscure the values that represent these fundamental dependences, then we inevitably damage the world; we diminish life.  We begin to ‘prosper’ at the cost of a fundamental degradation.”

A professor who teaches literature introduced me to Safford and helped me engage with art. “…we do not use up the richness of our favorite texts, but rather interpret them more deeply with each encounter.”  –Scott Slovic, “Literature.”  Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology.  Eds. Willis Jenkins, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim. New York: Routledge, 2017.  p. 355-362.

Grizzly love: maps and dreams

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“Those bears saved my life” –Doug Peacock, Grizzly Country

“When you are down, when you are depressed, get outside and do something” –Doug Peacock

“Saving the wild is the mother of all things.  That’s where we gather our intelligence…that quality of wildness lives in all of us” –Doug Peacock

“I have thought for a long time now that if, some day, the increasing efficiency for the technique of destuction finally causes our species to disappear from the earth, it will not be cruelty that will be responsible for our extinction and still lesss, of course, the indignation that cruelty awakens and the reprisals and vengeance that it brings upon itself…but the docility, the lack of resposibility of the modern man, his base subservient acceptance of every common decree.  The horrors that we have seen, the still greater horrors we shall presently see, are not signs that rebels, insubordinate, untamable men are increasing in number throughout the world, but rather that there is a constant increase in the number of obedient, docile men.”  –George Bernanos quoted in Nonvioloent Communication: A Language of LIfe, 3rd edition, Marshall B. Rosenberg

References: The Center for Nonviolent Communication, which Marshall B. Rosenberg founded, is in Albuquerque, about a block away from where I live.  https://www.cnvc.org