Motorcycles

“Sooner or later, everyone’s story has an unfortunate event or two…The solution, of course, is to stay as far away from the world as possible and lead a safe, simple life.”
― Lemony Snicket, The End

I was driving to the hair salon to see my beloved Reny and get my grey amped up.

Yes, you heard me, I’m embracing my inner crone, who is making her debut in my life one strand of coarse grey hair at a time.

On my drive through the canyon that morning, the traffic was light, so I was tooling along at a pretty good clip; lost in my thoughts, thinking about some drama from my past, when a motorcycle startled me – zipping past me on the left.

As you know, we ride a lot and there is a practice, splitting lanes, which is riding between lanes of traffic, and is legal here in California.

Before I rode, I used to think those riders were jerks who just wanted to get where they were headed faster than the rest of us fools, who were stuck in our cars.

Au contraire.

I got schooled by the hubby in the beginning of our relationship when we, to my horror, split lanes in traffic on the 101 freeway, and I yelled for him to stop acting like a criminal. “Let’s not be that guy, shall we?”

“Motorcycles are air cooled” he informed the very naive, backseat driver behind him on his bike, “so they have to stay moving, otherwise you’ll have a bunch of overheated bikes tying up traffic even more.”

Mea culpa Big guy, I stand informed and corrected.

Still, it hasn’t lifted the jerk stigma that I KNOW the other, not as clued in drivers, level on us as we wind our way between their cars during rush hour.
I’ve seen the stink eye they give us as we go by, so I close my eyes now.

If you can’t see people, they can’t see you – right?

As we weave in and out of the lanes of slow moving vehicles, we cut it thisclose to their rear view mirrors so I’ve asked him on several occasions: what happens if we hit someone’s mirror?
“We keep going.”

Jerk factor just ramped up several notches. Did you feel it?

We never have, thank God. I would have had to hear it, since I’m blind with my eyes closed, and I wear my invisibility cloak.

But low and behold, after I had this lane splitting flashback, I came out to my car, (with a lovely, new, fabulous silver wash over my hair) to a mangled rear view mirror on my drivers side, that I suspect was the unfortunate recipient of motorcycle karma.
As I looked for a note or flowers or some kind of clue as to the identity of the culprit, my husband’s voice echoed in my ears “we don’t stop, we keep going.”

Still Jerky.

And karma…. you have the wrong car! I’m just a passenger; a blind, invisible, unwilling participant.

When I was meditating later, and asking about the whole mirror, Karma debacle, you know what the Universe said? You’re gonna laugh, I did.

“You were thinking about some past drama too much, it wasn’t motorcycle Karma at all (besides, Karma doesn’t make mistakes) it was to get your attention and to remind you to move forward, stop looking behind you – stop living in the past.
Rear view mirror – get it?”

Ha. Got it.

What signal, signs, metaphors does the Universe send you? Do you always recognize them, or are you dense, like me?
Tell me about it. Help a girl out.

Sending love and good Karma,
Xox

https://soundcloud.com/jbertolus/audio-recording-on-wednesday

Fear had its grubby mitts on me and was dragging me systematically, with every anxious, shallow breath, deeper down the rabbit hole.

It replaced my relatively rational mind with that of a caveman being chased by a T-Rex.

I was in constant fight or flight mode, assessing every threat on a scale of one to ten. One being completely benign, a kitten sleeping on a chair, ten being a lumber truck filled with deer barreling toward us. Every moment on the motorcycle felt like a ten.

What the hell had happened to me?

If I had to name the soundtrack playing in my head all day long, it would have been the theme from Jaws and The Shining on an endless loop, ramping up my adrenalin, and whipping my nerves into a frenzy.

Studies have shown the detrimental effects of fear on the human psyche.
I was a textbook case.

Fear affects our thinking and actions.
It made me into a dumbass. My thinking was completely skewed which caused me to act like a huge fraidy cat.
I wanted to turn right, if you can imagine that, on our Left Turn Trip which prompted a stern admonition from my husband. “You’re acting like an idiot. Stop it.”

Fear hinders us from becoming the people we are meant to be.
Where was that carefree, fearless woman who was game for anything and loved seeing the world on the back of a bike? She had ceased to exist, replaced instead by a woman afraid of wildlife. Not lions and tigers and bears (oh my) but freakin’ Bambi.

Fear can drive people to destructive habits. To numb the pain of distress and foreboding, some turn to things like drugs and alcohol for artificial relief.
Yep, I was main lining the wine and chocolate. All concern for healthy living left me. Why bother. I could be killed at any moment so a big, fat, chocolate croissant or a sticky bun for breakfast were just the gateway drugs for a day of self-destructive culinary debauchery.

Fear steals peace and contentment. When we’re always afraid, our life becomes centered on pessimism and gloom.
Peace and contentment were distant memories for me now. I was a frazzled wreak. Being hyper vigilant is exhausting. I couldn’t even take in the beauty of the scenery, it was no longer about the journey, I just wanted to get to the next destination and get the hell off this God forsaken death march…I mean road trip.

Fear creates doubt.
Yes – yes it does, and I think my husband started to doubt my sanity right about then.

This next story is kind of my perfect storm of fear’s behavioral anarchy.

One afternoon around three, we found ourselves entering back into a forested area after being along the coast most of that morning. It was extremely overcast, dark and gloomy, so much so that all vehicles had to use their headlights in the middle of the day.
In other words: summer along the Northwest coast.
Well, that sent me into a terrified tailspin. I could feel every muscle in my body tense up. I tugged at my husband’s arm frantically, which is the Universal sign for “I’ve lost my mind, pull over immediately.”

Now stopped on the side of the highway, I screamed over the traffic whizzing by into his helmet this question, which I’m SURE is on the MENSA qualification exam.

“Its gotten so dark out, do you think the deer think that its dusk? They can’t tell time, maybe they operate from the changes in light? Are they getting ready to start leaping out? Because if they are, I think we should stop riding RIGHT NOW!”

That was it. He’d had enough.

Forcefully grabbing both my shoulders, he looked me square in the eyes and yelled over traffic. “This has GOT TO STOP. I don’t care if you want to drive yourself nuts, but now you’re driving me INSANE.”

“I can’t believe I’m even going to say this: DUSK is DUSK. Get a grip woman.
We’re riding all the way to Cannon Beach today and we may not get there until after dark. DEAL WITH IT. I’m finished indulging your fears.
Yes, it’s true, you may die on the bike. It may be a buck, it may be a lumber truck, it may be because I had a brain aneurism caused by all this nonsense!”

“Nevertheless, I want my old wife back!”

“I want to hear you humming songs and talking sweetly to yourself behind me. I want to feel your light touch on my back, not this horrible death grip you’ve acquired. I want to see joy instead of fear in your eyes.
Most importantly, I want your IQ to return to it’s former level…NOW!”

He chucked my shoulders to punctuate the end of his lecture and to make sure I was still paying attention.

Without another word, we got back on the bike and rode away.

And THAT ladies and gentlemen is how I overcame my fear of bambi, and death.

Do you have that someone that will give it to you straight? Not let you be led by fear? Call them right now and thank them and then tell me about it!

Brave, brave, love ,
Xox

• People always ask me if I’m afraid I’m going to die on the motorcycle, which leads me to ask them: Are you afraid to live?

  About ten years ago, we, my hubby and I, decided to take our “Left Turn Ride.”
  Our plan, (which was hatched over too much wine on a Friday night, but brilliant just the same) was to ride up the west coast of the US, from LA to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, staying as far left as the roads would allow without having to wear a wetsuit.

  Our trip motto: When in doubt – turn left.

  Those were in the days before I met Ginger who turned me onto custom earphones and the concept of riding with music playing at all times. I now go to great lengths to assemble the perfect soundtrack for each day of our rides.
  Big, sweeping instrumentals for curves and great scenery, Sting for the moors of Scotland and Ireland, Billy Joel, Annie Lennox or Gaga for city riding and even a best-selling book for the long stretches of flat, straight, highway in Wyoming.

  On this “Left Turn Ride” I had only my own thoughts to keep me company, which could put me into a kind of zoned out state of bliss, or wreak havoc, depending on what I was seeing, how much sleep and coffee I’d had, and my general state of being that day.

  I know.

  Crap shoot, in head to toe Kevlar, on two wheels going 80 m.p.h.
  
  I’m a pretty even-tempered person, relatively low maintainance (if you just heard a thud, that’s my husband falling out of his chair) I’ve even been known to fall asleep on the back of the bike.
  No, you don’t fall off.
  No, I don’t admit any of this to my mother.

  Up the coast of Oregon and Washington we rode through mile after mile of gorgeous redwood forests.
  The scent of pine is one of my all time favorite things in the world next to the sound of babies laughing and bacon.
  Redwoods and Pine trees are at the top of my list of the reasons Why I Ride.
  They feed my soul.

  Sometimes the forest gets so dense and dark and the smell gets so strong, like a Christmas tree farm, you become completely transported to another time and place; of fairies, devas and magic. The trees truly are not just living, but ALIVE, and so is the forest……and therein lies the rub.

  One day in central Oregon, if I remember correctly, we saw remnants on the road of a deer that had the misfortune of meeting the front bumper of a logging truck at 65 mph.
  Then another.
  The next day, a red pickup truck was at a gas station, totaled on all four sides as a huge buck had gone up and over the front hood and windshield, with its legs making contact with the side panels on its way down the back and straight to heaven.
  That is when my thoughts, left to their own devices without the distraction of music, went to work on me.

  “What happens if we hit a deer?” I asked later at lunch, picking all the good bits out of my salad.

  My husband looked at me as if I just slapped him and slowly put down his fork.
  Shaking his head and fiddling with his paper napkin (he HATES paper napkins, it’s the French in him) he let out a long sigh.

  “Well, I will try to slow down if I have the chance, I won’t jam on the brakes and I won’t swerve to get out of the way because THAT will kill us for sure.”

  I stopped chewing.

  “When we hit it, the guts will splatter all over us, the deer will die, it’ll total the front of the bike, but hopefully we’ll be okay.”

  Shit. I dropped my fork.

  “If it’s an Elk or a Moose, you can kiss your ass goodbye.”
  I’ll do all the same things, I’ll slow down, go straight ahead…..but we’ll all die. That’s a huge animal.”

  He nonchalantly picked up his fork and started to eat again, like he just given me the weather report.
  Cloudy with a chance of reindeer.
  I’m crying now, and in my best freaked out seven-year old voice I wailed:
  “What!!!!!!!??????? You mean…we could DIE! Holy shit!”

  He was laughing now, big giant guffaws of laughter.
  “You’re kidding, right? It never occurred to you that you could die on a motorcycle?”

  Because my fate suddenly seemed uncertain and life too short; I stopped a passing waitress and ordered a hot fudge sundae.

  “Well, no. Certainly not at the hands of a Bambi.”

  He went on to explain that the greatest threat was when the wildlife was most active – dusk and dawn. That is apparently when the most vehicle versus fauna accidents occur.

  My husband has this theory about accidents. They are a series of random events that converge at the same time and place. If you remove ONE component, the accident cannot occur. For instance, if you forget something and run back into the house delaying your departure by five minutes, that will either place you on or remove you from the accident timeline.

  I wanted to remove us from that timeline.

  My new rule: No riding before nine in the morning and kickstands down by five.
  
  Suddenly my beautiful pine forests were filled with terrifying, furry, four-legged terrorists ready to leap out at any moment and render us dead.

  Why I Ride is all about the experiences. It’s about Living life.

  Hadn’t I just said that to the person that asked me if I was afraid of dying?

  Now I found myself afraid for tens of hours a day, my eyes searching for animals lurking in the landscape, ready to leap.
  Cute became creepy.

  Fuck I hate fear, it changes you…..it was changing me.
  It was making me afraid of some implied danger, trading beautiful experiences for the illusion of safety.

  I was willing to forgo some of my all time favorite things –– the sunrise and sunset rides, the mystical, foggy, early morning departures right after coffee with the promise of a big breakfast after a couple of hours of sleepy coastal roads.

• No way Jose, I’m sleeping in. Those brazen killers will be stirring at that hour.

  Wait…why do I ride?
  (To be continued)

  Xox

  

I remember riding on the motorcycle last summer along the continental divide, admiring the groves of beautiful Aspen trees that filled the landscape for mile after mile, as far as the eye could see. At that point in September, their leaves were just turning the color of butter.

They are one of my favorite trees.
I have often marveled at their physical beauty, their mottled white bark and the shimmer of their leaves. But when one of my teachers back in the day, told me their amazing story, and how it related to humanity – well, I developed an entirely different appreciation.

Somehow the roads conspired with the music in my ears (or I’d just gotten better at choosing the tracks) as we would wind in and out of the gently sweeping curves, the edges lined with groves of graceful Aspens.

I like big, full orchestra, large, sweeping instrumental pieces when we zig zag through forests.

It provides a perfect soundtrack.
You all have soundtracks that run through your lives – right?

The day I’m thinking of in particular, I was listening to Peter Gabriel’s New Blood Special Edition, which is his genius SO album mixed with full, and I mean a FULL orchestra.
Many of the instrumental tracks are over seven minutes long and IN YOUR EYES, playing at full volume in my headphones all throughout the mountains of Utah, Wyoming and Colorado, just made me weep.
Perfect temperature, scenery, music, road and company often do that to me.
It really is magic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq9ZHVAOZDw

Here’s what’s so unusual and really quite mystical about the Aspens.
They are believed to originate from the root system of Pando, which at an estimated 80,000 years old, is thought to be among the oldest living organisms on the planet.

Aspens are very rarely solitary trees, their roots can lie dormant under the surface for years, for instance after a forest fire, or severe climate change, where they will wait for the optimum conditions for an entire grove, not just a few to flourish.

A tree is actually an above-ground stem that has emerged from a single underground root structure.

In other words, they are a collective, a community, all connected to each other with a strength and durability that remains unseen.

Don’t you love that?

My teacher relayed that story to me (which of course I immediately looked up, because it sounded like a bullshit fairytale) to make the point about the origins of our human souls.
He hated that description: human soul. It would get him all fired up, red in the face.

“The soul is immortal, being human for a brief moment of time,” he’d huff.

“It is ancient, and every soul is connected, like the root system of Pando, Pando representing God or Source or whatever you want to call it. We, humanity, are the like stems or Aspen trees, we think once we’re above ground that we are autonomous, (the trees would NEVER be that stupid) when quite the opposite is true.” He was on a roll now.

He continued, “We get all of our wisdom, strength, and beauty from our unseen connection to each other and God. When one part of the group of Aspens is suffering, it affects the whole, once a certain percentage dies, the whole grove is lost. When it thrives, the same is true.”

He was making the second point about a world community, and about the fact that we should care what goes on not only next door to us, but down the street, in the next county, state and every country of the world. We tend to not pay particular attention to wars and suffering in faraway lands, but if you subscribe to the Aspen analogy, any human suffering affects the whole.

That particular teacher was a citizen of the world and he had a soapbox and wasn’t afraid to use it.

As I rode through the groves of Aspens, beholding all the beauty in front of me for those three weeks at the end of last summer,  I remembered his lecture and I could feel how sacred this planet truly is.

If you EVER doubt that, walk or ride, through nature.
No pulpit necessary.
That my loves is Church.

Tell me, do you feel the Universal connection in nature? How can we practice more connection in our day-to-day lives? Any thoughts? I LOVE your feedback!

Sending Aspen Connected Love,
Xox