Practice...

Zazen

The bike is my zendo,
The saddle my zafu,
Feet, cranks, gears, wheels offer their silent mantra
    with each revolution,
The GPS is my mala - counting the diligence of my practice,
The trail is my roshi - pointing the way and inviting me onward.

Mindfulness is each discreet moment,
Every point in the journey is the journey itself.

It has been said that we are all "swimming in enlightenment."
I choose to ride.


With this thought, I set out, spinning my tiny gear into the cool wet air... a sunset ride in the middle of the week... in the middle of a thunderstorm... I flowed through the neighborhoods of north Missoula and then I found myself in the middle of a field of wildflowers...

Soft velvet antlers.
Crunchy sharpening and jpeg artifacts.

In the middle of a spectacular sunset...

And very close to being exactly halfway to my goal of climbing 100,000 vertical feet for the year. I turned up a spur trail to get the last little bit and hit one of these:

Which was oddly enough when my GPS registered this:

Exactly 1500 feet. That makes 50,000 vertical feet of climbing since I started keeping track in February.

This was also a good opportunity to be thankful. Thankful that my knee was still in one piece and working well. Thankful that the time, place, and opportunity to have these experiences have all come together. Time to go home.

Good lights, great trail.
There is something really quite special about riding singletrack in the dark.

It started pouring rain as soon as I got back to the pavement. I also noticed that I had lost my rear blinky light somewhere along the way. It figured that after hundreds of miles of sitting happily on my saddlebag, it came off just when it was needed most... so I rode cautiously, in the dark... in the rain... along a stretch of new pavement with an intermittent bike lane. My lights blazed steadily in front of me and I hoped that 900 lumens of illumination was enough to make me visible from behind.

I made it home with a sense of elation, accomplishment, relief; elated because of the experience of the ride, accomplished for reaching a milestone in my practice, and relief that I had not become roadkill.  Also altogether much more "present" than before I left. This is the mark of good practice: it is not enough to have mindfulness and awareness only when "practicing", it must continue, extend, and permeate all the other moments of life as well; aiming for the ultimate goal of there being no "other moments"... only this moment, just like this.

---

18 miles, 1550 feet of climbing.
(5 miles of road through town to and from cropped out)