Motorcycles: Facing Fear and Feeling Free

The sky was gray and it drizzled, still, we braved it.  I put on my Bombshell boots, matching gloves, and my Scorpion helmet.  Never having found a motorcycle jacket I liked (in matching white of course) I suffer in my H&M black leather bomber from years ago.  At first I was nervous.  It had been a long time since I had been on the back of a bike.  Yes, I was just on the back, not driving, but still.  I used to be young and fancy free.  I used to swing as high as I could and then jump off at the height of the arc.  Not any more.  Now I have gene survival on the brain and I find it makes me a little more paranoid than I used to be.  Riding outside the box doesn't exactly lead one to believe you'll be on the planet for any length of time.  Riders call it "the fear."

Everyone has to master it at some point, deal with their own particular brand of road demons.  As we drove along Redwood, curving through the misty day, winding our way along the lake, through moss covered trees, and gurgling streams, it came to me.  Why was I afraid? What was I afraid of? I had ridden side saddle on the back of an old purple Kawi in India and had thought nothing of it, and there, God forbid, I wasn't always wearing a helmet.  Of course, speeds were different.  The whole thing was different.  It was more like a tame version of bumper cars, whereas this, this could be life and death.  I knew people who had been hurt, a friend who was killed. 

Yet, for that winding hour, I wasn't worried about the right-hand turns which used to jangle my nerves. Instead I felt free.  I was free to be in the world.  It was okay to know that I could die at any moment, that I would die eventually, and it would be at the time meant for me to go.  We cannot know what happens in the world, and where we are in the balance.  We just have to trust that we live our lives to the fullest every day, in whatever way we can, however we can.  So what was there to be afraid of?

After burgers and wandering through Berkeley, Emeryville, and then finally Oakland, we wandered our way through previously unexplored realms of East Bay.  I will freely admit there is something that happens when you are on a motorcycle that cannot when you are trapped in a car.  You smell and hear everything.  You look down into the other cars on the road.  You feel the heat coming off the school bus engine idling behind you at a stop light.  The changes in temperature and humidity from one location to another are tangible to you in moments.  The world bares itself to a biker in a way it can never for someone driving a car.  I even caught a whiff of a man's cheap cologne as he crossed the street.  It's not always pleasant, but at least its honest.  There is a relief in the truth.

Even after hours of riding, the fear only caught me once, when the freeway home turned into ten plus lanes, with hardly any cars present.  It's times like then I feel exposed.  Even though I was holding on to Christian, I felt like I would fly off at any second.  Nothing was there to break my fall.  When there was a car that happened to pass on either side, I wondered what would happen if I became unbalanced and fell, what would happen to my shell of a body? Would it be over in an instant? All around me was the possibility of death.  I don't know why it happens on those wide open freeways, but every time, like clockwork, the rising tide of fear grabs me.  This time it was short, and we were in Hayward in minutes, so hyperventilating or sobbing on the back wasn't an option like the last time I was on a major highway in Phoenix.

Even though I did have a moment of panic on the freeway, overall, I felt good being back on the bike.  It had been months.  I have the saddle sores to prove it.  Plus, I missed my boots and gloves.  There is something about awesome gear that makes you feel about ten feet taller and puts a swagger in your step.  I might still have some way to go in my relationship with motorcycles, but at least I freed myself enough to ride on one and take in everything the world has to offer on an overcast Friday afternoon.

Spiritual Not Religious?

Having a lot of time on your hands is dangerous.  I know this first hand.  The last few months have given me way too much time to stew in my juices.  It caused me to over think some things and finally spend some time on others.  Writing basically carried me over the last hill of thought in order for me to reach a few conclusions.  Add a little bit of stewing, and I was finally able to voice some thoughts I've been having but couldn't articulate until now.  It was hard.  It was really hard.

First you should know that pastors are in my family.  People tend to become business people or ministers in my family - those are the top most popular occupations (with farming as a close third thanks to my mom's side). So when I got handed two ministers as parents, it was no wonder that my Christian socialization was deep.  Even though my parents are progressive, my father's enlightenment thinking (sorry Dad, but it's totally true) and my mother's more hooby dooby perspective (only recently discovered), I still somehow was hemmed into the Christian fold.  Even when I was in highschool, desperately wanting to try out and see different religious customs, I was required to be in church every Sunday.  It is the price of being a child of the clergy.  The rule is that pastor's kids are either very good or very bad, there is nothing in between.  I fell in the good category.

It was through a process of rebellious ebb and flow that I some how came to my current spiritual place in time.  Maybe it was the natural progression, from the wild ride of art school, to studying abroad in atheist Central Europe, to finally studying world religions in the religious melting pot of the world - India.  It must have been the result of these things, and the failure of church after church to do what I thought was required.  In the end, the result was a complete disillusionment, and ultimately, a loss of faith. 

For a time I thought God had been stolen from me by someone.  Someone else hadn't done their job.  I wanted someone to defend God, to make it right, to prove something was good about religion.  And the truth is there are some things that are good about religion - the community of Christianity and several other world faiths, the code of ethics that helps people to be better and strive to change the world for their fellow humans, or the kernels of truth that are gleaned by each of the world religions.  The problem is that none of them are all right.  None of them are completely true, and some of the things are down right false.  It's true.  I can't deny it having studied what I have and knowing what I know from the different experiences I've had.

Don't get me wrong.  I believe in God.  And maybe I'll find a religious community that won't mind my heretical thoughts some day.  It would be nice to be with a group of people who want to do good in the world, who have some kind of faith that guides them, who don't give me funny looks when I say some of the things on my mind or talk about the experiences I've had.  That seems to be the best I could possibly hope to find short of starting some new kind of institutionalized wonder (and that has its own set of problems).

All I know for certain, is that something is out there nudging me in some kind of direction, and I have no idea who I will be in five years.  I hope it will be the person I put up on my goal board, but who knows what that person will believe or seek in the world.  I just know I will be different. Knowing and accepting that somehow makes things so much easier.  I recommend it to everyone, regardless of the journey to your current spiritual place.

Hermits for life! Or until Sunday

Sometimes I hate being around other people.  I can be extremely introverted.  I am so introverted that I would rather sit in my house all day by myself working on my own projects and thinking than venture outside to possibly encounter another human being.  I wasn't always like this, and even now I can venture into the realms of extroversion.  But for the last two months, I have been living in a near hermit state. 

I think it started, the hermit tendency, in India. Like most women, I don't necessarily trust men I don't know. In Delhi, the public space was very male, and not in a good way.  It was the ogling, leering, watch out or you will get groped way. Rather than try to deal with that, because it was so uncomfortable, I would not leave the flat where I was living.  The only time I did was when I had an escort of some sort.  It was a struggle to work myself up to going out even to meet a friend.  It wasn't that I wanted to be completely isolated.  I just didn't feel entirely safe there.  Perhaps it would have helped had I any serious command on the language.  In any case, it also created a sort of Indian version of myself (complete with accent and head bobbing), which surfaces its subdued and demure head only in an Indian cultural setting.  But the scarring stayed.  When I got home, I stayed in my house.  Being in public was okay because there were so few people (India is very densely populated).  But now, any time I move anywhere new, I hide for a while before I can come out and feel like it's safe.  The process is long.  I think I have always had a similar tendency, though it became much more pronounced after India.  I would have to work on it to get it to disappear.

The plus to this style of living is I never have to interact with anyone I don't care to talk to.  I have to seek people out.  Luckily for me, the Bay Area is a place where people collect from my past lives.  So far I have friends from college, high school, art school, and graduate school all represented.  Seems an easy place and time to choose interactions.  I'm just hoping I don't end up in these types of situations.  The place is too big, it seems unlikely... but you never know.