Run to the Rez is coming up this weekend. I’ll be there listening and hoping to find words to describe this rally and Veterans honor ride.

More than just a gathering, the four-day motorcycle rally, ‘Run to the Rez’ is also a mystery. Albert Einstein wrote of mystery, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He [sic] to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to consider and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

Absent an openness to awe, our lives inhabit a worn-out structure, we become dry bones baked in desert dust. And bereft of awe, especially now when we need it more than ever, our vision is compromised, and we cannot see or sense the remnants of an ancient past shivering down the branches and over the highways.

Energy drives that mystery and powers a seed to burst through the desert crust or volcanic rock in search of light. This energy steers the way at Run to the Rez.

Motorcycling among the Apache’s seven sacred mountains, it’s easy to recognize our finitude and smallness in the face of rugged geography. At the same time, when purple mountains majesty moves us, we sense our connectedness to something beyond singularity and smallness. It is material, it is mystical; it is breathtaking and breath-giving to the fire, to the ghost dancers, and to the riders  Aho

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