I am participating in a monthly creative/therapeutic and regenerative For Women Unfolding: The Write, Embody, Heal! workshop group led by my creative colleague and friend Kelsay Myers. I appreciate the group not only for its ability to remind me to slow down, to breathe, and to embody (myself in) the moment, but it also inspires me to have creative-play when it comes to my writing, something that hasn’t happened for years.
Although this is only our second meeting, I’m amazed at the insights that have surfaced as a result of this two-hour meditative writing and spiritual circle we hold, albeit virtually. Insights like: I love to be creative in my writing, I just have forgotten that I can do that outside the bounds of work; I’m not a terrible person, I’m simply myself. Today I realized that having a sense of community is really essential to our physical, mental, emotional, and creative well-being. I haven’t felt like I had my own “tribe” for years, and the loss of that has been a big contributing factor to the creative atrophy of my soul.
The road is long, but what I love so much about this journey is all the unexpected growth that happens because of sitting with an image or idea and tossing it around like a physical object with others who hold the space for me as I explore. I get to ask questions like what if? of myself, opening new possibilities and shutting down old expectations and paradigms that really don’t fit who I am or (grammar, forgive me) becoming to be.
The accusation that I am not a professional person is a fear that followed me for a long time. I was ashamed that I’d much rather ride my bike than wear a fancy suit and sit through extended meetings with other people in suits, talking about the bottom line of this or that. Cycling, dancing, running, existing more fully in each moment is something that, simply, calls to me. But, I realize that I have got to start honoring that part of myself. During the shelter-in-place order, I’ve worked in mini-walks or stretching sessions throughout the day. Even just sitting cross-legged on the floor has helped me to access the part of myself that loves to create rather than sitting “professionally” at a desk. Writing freehand, doing a handstand, riding the bike before or after work— these things fuel me. I am learning that all of this is OK.
For years, I also felt embarrassed about my desire to integrate my creative work with what I did as an athlete. For me, one was always an expression of the other, a two-way metaphor: the poetry was a pedal stroke, and the pedal stroke, a line of poetry. My feelings of unease had to do with conformity (not fitting into a community) where all the people I met were distinctly one or the other. I wasn’t one or the other. I was very much (still, even now) both: a person who loves the physicality of my existence, but who loves to come home at the end of the day and write about it. Weird. But, that’s me.
I also want to be clear: I don’t necessarily mean “athlete” as one who competes as much as I mean it as “one who does.” The act of running or riding, dancing, swimming, whatever— the daily practice of doing those things— is the poetry I speak of. While I have written about competition, I prefer the broader definition of an athlete. Insight and inspiration have come to me in the middle of a lazy Sunday ride, just as it has on a brutal climb in the middle of a road race.
Today: Meditating on an Image
In today’s group, Kelsey read us lines of poetry, offering those words to act as prompts for our 30-minute free-writing session. While so much of it was beautiful, the line: “May you kiss the wind and be certain that it will kiss you back” is what resonated the most with me, bringing an image and a feeling of not only one windy ride on the bike, but several. The words started to flow from me as my fingers did their dance on the keyboard.
The point in this exercise is not to be good, but to be expansive, to open your heart and mind to the universe and engage in what I’d call “the flow” of ideas and image in one long chain of metaphor (like the paper chains you made as a kid.)
I’m sharing with you what came out of that 30-minute session: 963 words filled with images I really haven’t thought of in a long time, but that needed to surface, that needed to show me that I have been who I am for years, and even though I refused to accept who I am, it’s never too late to start that healing process.
Taken during a wind storm in the Owens Valley— not quite Reno, but it conveys the crazy sand situation that happens when it gets truly windy.
“May you kiss the wind and be certain that it will kiss you back.”
I am thinking of a bike ride I did yesterday because even now in this uncertain moment, I am using my love of cycling to raise money and awareness for the Arthritis Foundation. I’m supposed to do a 525-mile ride down the coast of California—from San Francisco to L.A.—in October, and I have no idea if this is going to happen or be canceled like so many aspects of our former lives. However, I keep training, riding and posting links to my silly blog posts on social media because I have to come to believe in the power of commitment, and not breaking promises just because they aren’t easy.
I rode into the wind. If you are not a cyclist, riding into the wind probably doesn’t sound like such a harrowing thing—it might even sound refreshing especially if it is a hot day— but that is not the case. The wind pushes against you like a pair of big hands, denying you access to the miles ahead, and you no matter how hard you breathe and push and pull the crank, you move forward at a pitiful pace, inches instead of feet, miles begin to feel impossible.
The lighthouse at Point Reyes.
I remember bike rides I would take in graduate school where the circular pattern of my feet around the crank untangled the essays in my mind; I rode out to the Point Reyes National Seashore on a peninsula north of San Francisco where, at its farthest point from land rests a 19th-century lighthouse, a metal spire painted white with red, rusty accents from the constant spray of sea salt.
Sir Francis Drake, when he landed on this jutting finger of land in the 16th century, proclaimed it a new island, a landscape that could easily be discovered nearly five hundred years later on my bike, the wind whistles through the lonely power lines connecting the handful of ranches like dotted lines beside the crumbling paved road. My bike, angled at 45-degrees from the gale-force wind from the sea. (It was scary enough to make me believe I might actually fall over.)
That is the kind of wind that does not kiss you, but kicks your ass, humiliates you, makes you cry from pain and the realization that people are small when faced with the force of the natural world. This is the same landscape, where, in 2015, I am the first woman from Nevada to win the 600-mile CA Triple Crown Stage Race, where wind and rain and sun and blisters and cold and heat tried to kill me, but I succeeded regardless. This is the same landscape where, in 2018, I met a grandfather who was raising awareness and funds to help to find a cure for his grandson’s case of juvenile arthritis. This is the story of the little boy named Carter that keeps me riding now, into the wind.
The wind in Nevada is gusty, which is part of the reason why we don’t rely on wind turbines for power and why Lake Tahoe is not more of a sailing-mecca. The wind is fast and dry, slapping you across the face with sand and the road-grit, an exfoliation treatment for which you never asked and then stopping into a deceiving lull, waiting just enough time to slap you again.
The Point Reyes National Seashore.
It is worse if you are climbing and the shoulder of the road is narrow: you are pushed with nowhere to go, and no way to push back. There is a climb on my ride in the wind today up Toll Road, so-called because you used to have to pay a toll to ascend the 2,000-foot climb to Virginia City, which was once one of Nevada’s richest towns. Ranch-style homes line Toll Road, one: a house with albino peacocks, another with a herd of llamas. The initial climb is not steep, but steady, and the wind gusts, again and again, pushing sand and the smell of sweating sagebrush across my body.
And yet, there is that knowledge that I have from all the cycling I have done, that sometimes the wind can be your friend— your greatest adversary can, in the changing temperature swirl of a valley surrounded by high mountain peaks—turn kind. I make my turn at the halfway mark and the wind is at my back. I can hear the swirl of my tires on the road, and instead of fighting the wind, I become one with it.
Traveling at the same speed, my hair reacts in stasis, neither streaming behind me nor pushing itself against my face. The dust, too, stops pelting my skin because I travel alongside these particles in this jet stream of light.
It is effortless, it is flying; this, I imagine, is the physical expression of joy and why birds must spread their wings and hover in the wind in all the places I have ridden my bike. This is the wind assist, and I can feel the gentle push along my back like my parent’s hands pushing me on my first bike out into the world, and I discovered we are capable of far more than we often imagine.
me.
This is the laugher, the joy, the rides in summer twilight with friends to the farm with the peacocks, the rainbow of blooming iris, the photo-bombing quarter horse who saddles up to the fence and “smiles”, the golden light cresting the lines of vineyard grapes many Reno residents have planted in their yards.
This the wind kissing me at my back as if to say “godspeed” on this journey that may or may not happen in October, like many things that may or may not happen.
Yet, I know no matter what happens, there will be, undoubtedly, wind.