Illuminate

Illuminate. Humans are the only living beings that suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). It’s not that other organisms don’t feel sluggish, tired and unmotivated during the winter months. The difference is that they don’t fight it. They hibernate. They sleep. They hole up. They lie dormant. They embrace the stagnation of the lifeless season. They understand and recognize winter as a time of rest, recovery and preparation. Humans don’t have much compassion for winter. We have a hard time seeing its purpose. We mostly just see it as a nuisance, something that we need to endure. We also expect to keep the same work hours and productivity level year round even if our bodies are most often telling us that it goes against our natural biological rhythm. We have no respect for winter’s weight. An attitude of dissociation from the natural world that we ironically are also part of. Riding up into this open area last weekend, my eyes caught a glimpse of the bright high noon sun shining down. Feeling like I was running on empty, I stopped to soak it in. Standing there alone, looking directly at the light, letting it gently kiss my bare face, I felt myself mercifully being filled up. We constantly try to fill our energy deficit with caffeine and food. But what if one of the best remedies for the winter blues is simply natural sunlight. Illuminate.

Pain Cave

Pain cellar.  There is this place deep inside of me that I am no longer willing to go to.  Actually, it’s more than an unwillingness.  It’s more like a newfound inability.  So many years spent regularly venturing there.  Relentlessly practicing.  Going deeper and deeper.  Mind over matter.  Mobilizing every last bit of willpower.  Attempting to overcome.  Forcing it.  Fighting against my own body.  At war with the very framework that keeps me alive.  Physically thrashing my own life-giving anatomy.  My body’s instincts begging me to back off.  Still stubbornly pushing through.  The lactic acid burn of each effort highlighting the smoldering effect of my inner hellfire.  A desperate attempt to release what I have been suppressing for so long.  The rescue method that I have used so many times before, without realizing that it only releases the pressure, but never really cleans up the mess.  Aggressive force can never shine light onto repressed darkness.  This is the type of pain that can never be conquered.  It requires a merciful approach to melt it away.  Riding for me is no longer a form of self-punishment for the pain that I cannot feel.  It’s a friendship with my body.  A harmonious camaraderie with my soul.  An act of kindness.  A gesture of self-love.  A peaceful coaxing.  A prayer inviting what is no longer serving me to check out.  How clean do you keep your inner basement?  Pain cellar.

Open Spaces

Open spaces. Feeling lost. Still knowing exactly where I was. Part of me trying to run away. The other part of me trying to find my way. The unplowed snow covered gravel service road so much slower than when I had last ridden it last summer. The loose rock surface now completely covered with deep tire ruts in the firm snow. In my mind, the distance that I had to cover seemed so much less than what it felt like as I was pedaling through it. The boundless energy, and engaging conversation with the old lumberjack over an hour ago, were but a distant memory. The humble logger had reminded me of my dad. He was impressed by my bike, not expecting to see someone riding way out here, especially in the dead of winter. We were both impressed by how gorgeous and peaceful it was in the woods that day. I struggled to keep moving as the road crested. Out of the forest, into the open. Against the frozen field backdrop, I felt as lifeless as this iced meadow looked. I thought about the dormant life under the heavy snow blanket. Buried. Unable to move. Its vitality also concealed. Idling. It knows that its time to blossom and shine will come. The pasture isn’t in a rush as it waits for Spring under the snow. Nature is never desperate. It just patiently waits. Winter’s pace is definitely slow-moving. But, it’s still forward. Open spaces.

Woodland

Woodland. My eyes infatuated with the smooth white lane in front of me, my gaze diverges just enough to notice the trunks and branches go by on both sides of the blurry tree corridor that I am riding through. The singing and humming of the fat studded tires rolling on the packed snow create such a pleasant melody that echoes under the forest canopy. The deep rumble, different from the sound of riding on dirt, gravel or pavement, but just as beautiful. A drumroll in anticipation of the next drop or banked turn. No struggle. Just allowing. No thinking. Just, in the moment, flow. Winter mountain biking conditions literally at it’s absolute finest. My riding mindset has definitely changed the last few years. My eyes no longer look for the fastest lines. My mind no longer focuses on the wheel ahead and behind me. It’s more about seeing and carving the trail’s smooth fun lines. Taking the longer line to carve a turn or hit a jump. The urgency of the race has left my reason. It’s absence creating space. Space for the exhilaration of the ride experience to surface. My riding is less about the adrenaline and more about the serotonin. The trail system no longer my proving ground. It’s my playground. Woodland.

Birch Church

Birch Church. Before the doctrines and the scriptures. Before the priests and the preachers. Before the commandments and the repeated prayers. Before the dogma and the creed. Before the structured religions and ideological systems. Before the temples and the public worship buildings. Before all of this, since the very beginning, human animals have always gone to church. Alone, riding through the white birches, this all became so very clear as I realized where I was. I was in the original church. The sunlight, radiating through the trees, like stained glass, drawing pretty lines on the snow white canvas. The silence and serenity in that moment, caressing me with it’s deep sense of peace. I just stood there, beside my bike, submerged. The setting guiding me towards truth. Not a generic golden truth. Not someone else’s truth. My own personal truth. The truth that lives deep inside of me, in my heart. Truth that you can’t find written in a book, especially one that you haven’t written. After re-mounting my bike, hunkered down over my bar and stem, each pedal stroke became my silent prayer. A communion of sorts with nature and the sheltering forest. The surfacing intimate truth my gospel. I am not religious, but I know what church feels like, and it doesn’t necessarily have to do with man-made religion. Mine was lined with white birches. Birch Church.

Youth

Youth. What I miss most about my youth isn’t my hairline or my smooth taut skin. What I miss most about my youth isn’t the fact that I could eat junk food and party regularly without any noticeable physical consequences. What I miss most about my youth isn’t even my strength and vitality. What I miss most about my youth is not knowing and fully understanding what can and will eventually go wrong. What I miss most about my youth is the feeling of being an exception to the rules of eventual misfortune. What I miss most about my youth is still believing that bad things only happen to other people. What I miss most about my youth is the fearlessness. We can only fear what we know. A smoker isn’t afraid of getting cancer until he knows cancer. And I wasn’t afraid of hitting my head until I knew how much a seemingly mild concussion could affect every single thing in one’s life. It seems so backwards. The test teaching the lesson. Ignorance is bliss. Maybe the meaning of this proverb isn’t simply about innocence and not knowing? Maybe the meaning of this proverb is more about the wisdom and understanding that can only come with age? Maybe the meaning of this proverb is more about the fact that true bliss can only come from the heart and not from the mind? Maybe the most meaningful proverbs take an entire lifetime to understand? Maybe? Youth.

Stories

Stories. As a young child, I just loved listening to stories. My young curious mind completely captivated by the narrative. As I grew older, I started writing my own. Even before learning how to draw letters and words, I wrote stories by etching images into the grey matter of my mind. And as my stories repertoire grew, I spent more and more time telling them. I came to understand that hearing my own words as I described my life experiences always taught me something new about myself. Voicing my stories seemed to give me a fresh new outside perspective. They liberated me, making me feel more removed, less confined. The older I got, the more spectacular my stories became. Some of my stories become so large that they took on a life of their own. They became legends. Like the stories of how our grandparents walked to school when they were young, memories tend to be rewritten and embellished with time. They say that in the end, all that will be left are the stories. But what if maybe even the stories gradually dwindle and eventually disappear? Like a fat bike tire track through the snow during a storm, what if our stories slowly fade until they become completely buried? It wouldn’t be personal. It wouldn’t be that our stories aren’t good enough. It would just be part of life’s natural cycle of evolution and renewal. After our stories are gone, only their lingering effects would remain. And these effects would surely spread far and wide. They would spread because all of our stories are connected. In the end, maybe we don’t become stories. In the end, maybe we simply realize that we were stories all along. In the end, maybe we realize that it was all just the one story. Stories.

Pocket Change

Pocket Change. Life is like a coin. It has two sides. The first is the business side. It encompasses all actions required for our survival. Some of these activities, like the beating of our heart, digestion, and the repair of bodily tissue are taken care of automatically by our amazing bodies. Other business activities, like how to earn money, home economics, and the rules of society need to be learned. Our parents start teaching us these concepts as infants, and school takes the lead as we get older. This side lives in our minds. The flip side of our life coin is the feelings side. All of our emotions naturally live here. We don’t have to do anything special to create them. They’re simply part of our existence, part of what it means to be alive. All we need to do is learn how to understand them, be with them, and every now and again, deal with them as they arise. The feelings side of our life coin is where we find love, compassion and intuition. This side lives in our hearts. Both sides are necessary, but very often not evenly polished. Life partner relationships built on the business side make excellent providers but passionless love stories. If your main purpose in life is to be happy, you will never find it on the business side. True happiness can only be found on the feelings side. Which side of your life coin are you holding face-up? Which side of your life coin have you been spending most of your time shining? True happiness may simply be a coin flip away… Pocket Change.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness. When I was a kid, forgiveness was as simple as saying or hearing the word “sorry”. Like magic, sorry fixed everything. Sorry made people get along and sorry made relationships run smoothly. As I got older, forgiveness became much more complicated. I’m not sure if the reason was because the actions and things that needed to be forgiven were becoming more significant and consequential? Or if it was just my growing ego that was getting in the way? “How dare they !” was most often what came up instead of a certain understanding and compassion towards the other. As forgiveness became harder and harder, the level of resentment that I carried steadily grew inside of me. The grudges that I held were not punishing those that had wronged me. They were a form of self-poisoning, a cancer that slowly gnawed at me from the inside out. The whole point of forgiveness is not to deny wrongfulness. The whole point of forgiveness is to no longer let the other continuously re-traumatize us over and over again. We need to let it go for us, not for them. But one must also never forget that the person who needs forgiveness the most is our self. Forgiving our self for our mistakes and regrets. Forgiving our self for being human. Being our very best self requires being able to look at our reflection in the mirror, or in the window of a busted door like in the second photo, and feel more self-love than self-hate. Stop victimizing your own self. Go ahead. Let it go. Freedom lives on the other side. Forgiveness.

Sustainable

Sustainable. When I started mountain bike racing in the early 90s, I would always start races sprinting off the line. My background was in BMX where races lasted less than 1 minute and the start was very important. But cross-country mountain bike races were much longer, close to 2 hours. In my mind, I knew that I should be pacing myself, that races were never won in the first few minutes, but I still bolted off at an anaerobic pace that I could only maintain for a few minutes at most. This usually brought me into the first single track section with the lead riders, but not for long. Once the fatigue set in, I was left struggling to finish, making the final hour so very painful and slow as I crawled to the line. Every single race, I unconsciously used the same approach, even if I knew by experience how it was going to unfold in the end. For some reason, I had this secret hope that I would have this amazing day where the energy wouldn’t fade and that I would be able to keep the faster pace for the entire distance. Thinking about this today, it sounds stupid and so simple to fix. Why did I get carried away over and over again? Why didn’t I learn to pace myself? Even now that I don’t race anymore, I often catch myself living life exactly the same way. I get caught up living so damn fast, sprinting between tasks, pushing harder and harder in an attempt to get ahead. Unconsciously I know better, but I keep telling myself that it’s only for a short while, that I’ll rest after the next milestone, then after the next one. I lose myself in the whirlwind of doing, chasing an eternally moving external target. We call it making headway, getting stuff done, taking care of business. But it isn’t normal even if it’s prevalent. It’s madness. It’s making us sick. This rat race is bullshit. It simply isn’t… Sustainable.

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School

School. I have come to understand that all of our actions either come from fear or from love. Fear hardens. Love softens. Fear closes. Love opens. Like darkness, which is the absence of light, fear is simply the absence of love. Fear isn’t something that needs to be conquered or fixed. The antidote to fear is simply love. Fear exists as a means to protect us. But we are not meant to live there. We are meant to live in love. My solo Sunday rides are like attending my own private school, where I am both the student and the teacher. The lessons coming to me as I settle into my spin. Alone, in the woods, away from the many distractions, the voice inside my head starts to make so much more sense. I’m not exactly sure how, but riding makes me smarter. Riding also make me a better person, happier and calmer. It makes more of my actions come from a place of love rather than fear. I’ve been experiencing a lull in my riding lately. My body is asking me back off, but my mind really still wants to go. It just loves and misses going to school.

Wild horses

Wild horses. I purposely haven’t made any resolutions or set any ride goals for 2020. Humans are the only animals that set objectives and spend time comparing themselves against measurable benchmarks. All other animals just go about living, simply being, without comparison. Society conditions us at a very young age that we are not enough. And we spend our lives trying to measure up and prove our worth. Other animals know that they are fine just the way that they are. Too often, goals usually just end up making me feel bad about myself instead of making me accountable to follow through. My motivation to ride my bike is intrinsic. It’s not about chasing results anymore. It isn’t even about chasing physical fitness. That’s simply a secondary benefit of riding. It’s about the heightened awareness that it gives me. The grounded feeling. The clarity. The open space. The peaceful silence. The aliveness. The high-vibrational state. The healing. The connection to nature at that perfect speed. Fast enough to enable me to take in more than I do when walking. Slow enough that my surroundings aren’t lost in a speedy blur. Don’t make your rides a punishment driven by fear of inadequacy. Make your rides an act of self-love. Like wild horses, we’re not meant to be tamed and controlled by fear. Like wild horses, all that we really want is to run free. Wild horses.

Resolutions

Resolutions. During the time of the year when we all look back to evaluate our life progress as well as set objectives for the next trip around the sun, I ponder. I wonder why there is so much self-improvement hoopla on January 1st compared to the rest of the year? I mean, technically, for all other animals living on earth, it’s just a regular day. Maybe we’re just way too busy the rest of the year? When I consider the questions from the standpoint of the measurable achievements and accolades accomplished this past year, I definitely feel as if I am falling short. I didn’t get a promotion at work. I didn’t win any special award. I didn’t earn a new title. I didn’t make more money. I didn’t move into a luxury home in an affluent neighborhood. I didn’t purchase a fancy expensive car. In fact, I don’t really have anything special or impressive to show for on the outside. But, I have lost and let go of many things on the inside. Fear. Self-doubt. Guilt. Shame. Self-defeating thoughts. An inner alchemy and purification of sorts. The result of lots of ongoing inner work and expansion. All invisible from the outside, but more important to me personally than any physical thing that I could have manufactured, produced or built. Daring to go where I was once so very afraid to go is the most important work that I continue to do. Don’t measure your progress only by what you have accomplished on the outside. Look within. Dare to explore your inner sky. Happy New Year! Resolutions.

Winter Solstice

Winter solstice. The shortest day of the year. The end of earth’s six month exhalation. The culmination of earth’s yearly light purge. The day when the earth is the most titled away from the sun. The extra darkness leaving us starving for light oxygen, making all life seem so very lifeless. A time for laying low, rest, recovery and rejuvenation. Why do humans have such a hard time embracing it as such? We’ve created these holidays that enable us to reconnect and spend time with our loved ones during this dim time of the year. But we end up running around in a frenzy as we rush and scramble, overfilling our days with parties and social outings. Are we missing the point? It may be a question worth asking? As much as winter solstice can feel like a low point, it also represents hope and brighter days ahead as the days now start to get longer. The beginning of earth’s six month inhalation. The switch from dying to rebirth as our planet starts to lean back into the sun, the source of all life. I have often said that I am not built or designed to live in this Canadian climate. Something about my body having a hard time thriving in this winter cold and darkness. But then again, it may just be that like other humans in the western society that I live in, I simply try to squeeze in too much, expecting to maintain the pace of warmer and longer days? Nature has its own rhythm. And the only way to thrive in it is to adopt the same frequency and amplitude. Winter solstice.

Shine

Shine. Endlessly chasing darkness, but never able to catch it, its rays simply continuously shine. Source of life energy and radiant light, it asks nothing but our embrace, our gift from this universe. Even when obscured by cloud cover or hidden on the other side of this planet earth, it is still there. It still gleams. Endlessly trailing the darkness that it can never meet, it radiates. The sun. Our revolving point. The darkness antidote. Both darkness and light cannot exist simultaneously. As soon as light appears, darkness disappears. It’s a scientific fact. Darkness, by definition, is the absence of light. As I sit here, in a certain darkness, I need to remind myself of this. As I sit here, all I need is to let this pass. All I need is to sit in the stillness of this night and wait for dawn of the new day. All I need is to wait for the light to bring me back to life. All I need is to let myself… Shine.