To ride a motorcycle over many miles is one way to participate in a mythic American grand narrative. It looks like a story of freedom and independence, but that is not real. If you think freedom and independence is real, then try being truly free and independent and see what happens.

The grander narrative, one animating dreamers everywhere, is change, and the will to leave a better world for our children and children’s children. I’ll embody that mantle anytime and do my part to create that story. I choose to bear this weight even if my shoulders are heavy and draped with an old story of Stoll and yoke.

On my bike, handlebars into the wind, riding above the suck, bang, and blow of explosions under me, I’ve searched out places of vision and intent.

Riding to Wyoming’s Red Desert — from Upper Michigan — for a three-day vision quest, my guide explained how and why I had to cleanse myself for unseen encounters. He did not say it, but I learned that if I were not truly prepared and if my ego was not set aside and my aggression diminished, the crows would pick me apart and drive me far away from their land. Wyoming’s Red Desert is like Hawaii that way. “If you are a prick,” a guy in Hawaii told me, “The island will kick you off.”

Without preparation and a willingness to listen and learn from a guide; without training and preparation to lay down an honest oath and true intention, I would not have heard an ancient ocean singing its song beneath the hardened desert sand in Wyoming; I would not have learned how I was to hold the bowl; I would not have learned that in Hawaii, gardens and graves grow up through lava and bend toward the ocean; I would not have learned from a geologist in Upper Michigan — based on gouges in the dark rock — which way the glacier went; I would not have learned where, in the far north, dragon and damselflies emerge, crawl, hatch and take flight for their brief, acrobatic life.