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.
A motorcycle trip is a ritual process when travel turns to immersion, embodiment, and enactment. These trips open into spaces where magical teachers appear in sandals, barefoot, or in moccasins and boots.
At the gravesite of Sitting Bull (according to a map), wild horses stared me down; on a ride through the seven sacred mountains of the Arizona Apache, bikers stopped their iron horses on the roadside to hear teachings and receive blessings from the Medicine Man; in remote Navajo land, I arrived at a hogan in Canyon de Chelly to meet a Dine’ elder just as he shapeshifted and slipped away in the form of a sprinting ground bird; in the streets of New Delhi, my motorcycle saved my life by driving for me. During journeys to Navajo and Apache sweat ceremonies with “drumming and footsteps from out of a dream” (James Taylor) portals unknown opened new medicine. My bike was the vehicle of deliverance in each case.
These encounters in traditional and newer ritual communities stir it up: like yoga events with post-modern gurus carrying the old medicine; hip-hop-inspired dancers, song singers, storytellers, drummers, rattle shakers, string players, fire dancers, teachers, and sages sharing their goods and their DJ vibes.
Recently at one of these gatherings in the land of enchantment, I turned as the doors squeaked open by themselves. Moved by the will of physical doors, and the doors of perception, I rose every day to shake or stir, and I dared to take it in with arms wide open. Back on my bike, riding down to Arizona, I shift my attention from road and speed to pen, paper, and slow time.
Every hand holds a winner, and every hand holds a loser, and so it is with each road trip made of both the tangible and intangible, the seen and unseen. Both are present in the undeniable energy and omnipresent roar around Sturgis every August, the bright colors and spectacle of the Rocky Point Rally in Mexico on the Sea of Cortez, the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride with vintage bikes and snappily dressed bikers, the Joshua Tree Bhakti Fest, the Sangha Fest, The San Carlos Apache’s Run to the Rez, and the MMIW rides all around the medicine wheel. It’s all background music to the steel symphony we generate when we twist the throttle and portal into currents unseen fired by winds and waves of the unknown. # # #
New Mexico, June 2024.
The garden grows and swells with rain and story, music, yoga, and storytelling by the Celtic Bard and I am stunned into silence and awe. Who wouldn’t drive across the country to sit with him and his wild lotus band in this garden? I must unhook my anchor from this marvelous and climb out or I will drown in the depths.
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