Sometimes, I just need something I can tangibly and realistically conquer.
Since I’ve moved here last year, I took my bike out maybe twenty times. That’s very little biking for someone who loves it. I nearly got hit once (by a car, while on a bike trail, no less), and the rest of the rides, I got discouraged every single time because biking does NOT equal anything even vaguely resembling leisure here. These big hills kick my ass, bad, despite my big, muscled legs which I’d like to think can tackle anything.
In Minneapolis, I could do twenty miles at a time, relatively easily. In Chicago, for a couple years I rode my bike to go teach ten miles away daily (in the seasons that I could), and didn’t even arrive sweaty. Smelling like bus fumes, sure, but not sweaty.
Here? I pick the wrong mile to bike and this girl is winded, legs burning, growling in frustration at the innocent earth.
So, I decided that while there are an awful lot of barriers with my work these days that, try as I might, I cannot seem to break through, I most certainly can tackle these damn hills and have the great escape a few times a week which I am in dire need of. I am an adaptable beastie, physically, emotionally, intellectually, and adaptation when it comes to my legs, my bike and this landscape requires nothing but simple persistence and dedication, two things which I ever have in spades. So, the goal at the moment is twofold: to be able to do fifteen miles here in a stretch, without undue struggle, and also to pick a new stopping point every day so that I can sit outside and meditate.
In light of my many current challenges, I decided that I really need to reread the Sutra on the Eight Realizations of Great Beings, and the Discourse on Happiness, with Thich Naht Hanh’s analysis and commentary on both. Read them once, read them twice, read them over and over again each day until some aspects of both of them sink back in. Read them with my feet on the grass, feet on the rocks, feet on the sand, feet in the water. Let my legs and my bike make harmony with the hills by having them all bring me to places where I can do this and have a few moments of peace and regrouping.
Yesterday, I swung down to the Burke-Gilman, and rode it up almost to where Pacific St. meets the I-5. Round-trip, that’s between seven and eight miles. And all it felt very good, save for the last mile uphill home. That didn’t feel good at all.
I doubled back to Gasworks Park for a sit before heading back, and settled unto the grass near the water to read my sutras.
I didn’t intend or plan for it to be such an obvious object lesson, but sitting down there, on the green grass, surrounded both by water and the looming, rusty gasification plant, beginning with “The First Realization is the awareness that the world is impermanent. All political regimes are subject to fall; all things composed of the four elementas are empty and contain the seeds of suffering…” was, needless to say, a bit like having the universe reach out a big hand, smack you a little upside the head and say, “Well, DUH!”
The people who built that plant clearly built it to last, and for the purpose it was built for. No doubt, they put an awful lot of effort into building it and working it, but all the same, here it sits, utterly changed, and per its original purpose, utterly useless. But it’s okay: I can sit there now, on the grass, by the water, appreciating it for what it is, not what it was, using it for an entirely different — and from my perspective, in my moment, a very important — purpose. That doesn’t negate the work everyone did in building and maintaining it, nor does it make their efforts unimportant. Even if it were utterly gone, rather than in the state it is now, the same would be true. It’s ridiculous to feel something you or anyone else has done loses import or meaning because its purpose has changed, or its initial purpose is moot; because whatever goal you had for it wasn’t met or fell or had to be abandoned. The work done in that gargantuan construction was meaningful in the doing alone, regardless of the result.
It’s also ridiculous for me to let my frustration or the hills keep me from moments like this. I need them very much these days, clearly.
September 12th, 2007 at 11:27 am
But it’s okay: I can sit there now, on the grass, by the water, appreciating it for what it is, not what it was, using it for an entirely different — and from my perspective, in my moment, a very important — purpose. That doesn’t negate the work everyone did in building and maintaining it, nor does it make their efforts unimportant. Even if it were utterly gone, rather than in the state it is now, the same would be true. It’s ridiculous to feel something you or anyone else has done loses import or meaning because its purpose has changed, or its initial purpose is moot; because whatever goal you had for it wasn’t met or fell or had to be abandoned. The work done in that gargantuan construction was meaningful in the doing alone, regardless of the result.
Hmm. Very sage words, there, miss H. Also seems fairly applicable to the current state of Scarleteen…
September 13th, 2007 at 7:54 am
Sounds like a good time to be reading some Thich Naht Hanh, who is on my list as well. I’m about to start a mindfulness-based stress reduction course (based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s program), and I think it’s going to be amazing.
September 13th, 2007 at 9:00 am
Hanh is basically my longtime spiritual teacher, Jen. That’s whose work has always resonated with me the most, from the start.
And you might be interested in the fact that my old sangha in Minneapolis is all Hanh-based practice and community. It’s right near the Birchwood, and just an awesome community: http://www.oceandharma.org/sangha.htm
And Molly? Yep.