A Home in The Unknown
The headwind of it all
The trickiness with acceptance is that, like everything, you can fool yourself into thinking that things are sorted before, perhaps, they truly are. Some part of your subconscious, some large part of your subconscious, refusing to bend. Or maybe it isn’t metaphorical at all. Maybe it’s just a twenty-mile-per-hour headwind. Very tangible, very much not hypothetical. Perhaps it is overly optimistic, too, to think I can find acceptance & equanimity in rejection so rapidly. How very magnanimous must I think myself, my golly.
The morning started out relatively calm, cycling past fields freshly fertilized with cow shit. The miles rolled on & slowly the wind evolved into an annoyingly perceptible presence. I’m not sure if I even considered headwinds as I was planning this cross-country tour. Foolish perhaps, but also a tad poetic to not even consider what will grow to be my greatest foe on this cross-country jaunt. At least up to this point, let’s say — pretty blessed on one hand; the wind is a big-boned bully on the other.
The wind was that sort of unrelenting nonsense that defies tricks to deal with it. I thought of ‘tacking’ in sailing. How you can make diagonal progress to a headwind in a ship. This is, of course, impossible when the very sedentary road does not allow for deviation. The asphalt strip, instead, pointed my ol’ self directly into the force of a strong headwind. It should be mentioned that my bicycle, laden with bags, is not the most aerodynamic of locomotion machines (it’s nice to have a bag of excuses to fall back upon, sometimes).
The story here, though, is how mental of a thing the wind can be. How incredibly powerful & relentless it is. Unlike the fixed exertion of getting over a hill where the frozen wave of land promises to not shift in steepness as you climb up it. The wind just is. Present. It’s just adversity without nuance. It’s just going to slow you down, & pretending it won’t be a classically foolish delusion. If there were a tangible, obvious way for the universe to manifest itself & bully & shove people around, it’d be in the wind. Some things just need to be endured.
The Landing
What developed was the swell & dance between sanctuaries for the night. I would set off from someone’s house & out into the day, and it would have felt like being out to sea. The time spent out on country roads would be the ocean swell between two peaks, two islands, places where I could stay the night.
It was odd to develop a sort of structure around constant change. How every different, friendly host had a similar feel about them. How the changing landscape & weather patterns led to thinking of the omnipotence & temperamental nature of storms across the sea. How there’s no place to hide, no shelter, often. How the ship (the S.S. Alphabet Dream Circus) is out to sea until a welcome harbor is reached.
What I’ve realized is how important these harbors are. The astonishing kindness & the little bits I’ve been able to do to make a sort of luxurious consistency in a day of unknowns on the fixed, asphalt sea. I’m talking about soap, here.
The fascination with delightful soaps crystallized, probably, with the legendary Ellen Sears (Peace Corps Volunteer, cheap sunglass legend). It all started — like so many things I talk about tend to do — in Togo when Ellen was mentioning how the pharmacy down the way sells some truly incredible soaps. Great scents, excellent lathering, and quality that lasts longer than the competition, which just stands to show that the cost is pretty comparable when you look at the longevity of the product. The moral is that phenomenal soaps, scents, are mental health heroes. This whole adventure is a different situation than the cockroach mecca that was my bucket-showering spot in Togo, but the point still stands. A luxurious soap can transform the experience.
Now, there is nothing quite like the days where I know I am able to take a shower, and my shower routine is at its peak with some great soap (now, unfortunately, finished, but Dr. Sasquatch makes some great stuff). There’s nothing quite like the power of cleaning yourself after a long while spent out in the wind on the metaphorical sea. The simple & powerful delight of rest & taking care of yourself.
I have an aesthetically pleasing comb I love for my hair. A tiny brush for my tiny beard. I use mustache wax my parents bought for me while we were in South Africa. I meditated with a mala that I used my last year of college & throughout my time in Togo. My favorite cup is a tin mug my brother got for me at a remote tea shop in Banff (a companion throughout Togo as well). I wear a cross (ankh-like) that was my great-grandmother’s (and my dead uncle’s for a spell as well — a fellow soul with a love of plants). My existence is transitory & nomadic, but I am surrounded by delightful luxury. I have a balm that smells like old religion (it contains patchouli & my mom hates it, however). Just thoughtful self-maintenance. Because that’s really what this is, isn’t it? It’s turning the everyday into a ritual, recognizing the sacredness of the quotidian.
I’m typing this with a delightful Bluetooth keyboard, & I’m grateful for the portable comforts of the road (coupled with the unexpected kindnesses along the way). I’ve been living a sort of ‘adrift,’ ‘untethered’ lifestyle for quite a while, and sure, there’s a fair bit of adversity along the way. Sometimes the wind roars to the point of obscuring sound. Whooshing too loudly in the wrong direction for me to hear the cars coming from behind. The sort of feeling that the wind is whisking away pieces of myself, and then I’ll roll into some safe harbor for the night. The wildness of the hypothetical sea fades away, replaced by the feeling of landing and the amazement at being in a new place.
There’s a decent bit in Buddhism about being where you are, living in the now, acceptance of the journey, all that good stuff, etc. I’m still struggling to find acceptance in the wind. Too often I’ll give a shout (quelque fois en français) when the wind dials up a few notches for no reason at all. But maybe that is its own strange acceptance of adversity. An expletive back into the face.
The interesting footnote to all of this is I’ve never felt closer to the snippets & pieces of books I carry around with me in my mind than now (turning & turning in the widening gyre / the falcon cannot hear the falconer — Yeats).
My soap fascination has roots, too, in the journey of the lemon soap of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, there is a fun discussion around people becoming part of their bicycles & their bicycles absorbing bits of themselves. The obligatory mention to Jack Kerouac’s American vagabond, On the Road. The less obvious relation to The Road by Cormac McCarthy, how his post-apocalyptic America peaks through on some of the broken roads & abandoned skeletons of buildings. & the mad adventure-journey of Gregory David Roberts’ auto-fiction, Shantaram. The list is asymptotic to endless; I think.
I am an amalgamation of everything I have read & everything I have experienced. That fun blurred line between life & fiction. That bit about how your brain doesn’t much distinguish between consumed literature & lived experience.
I once saw this quote by Benjamin Disraeli painted on a building in Amsterdam,
Like all great / travelers / I / have seen / more than / I / remember / & / remember / more than / I / have seen.
I’d like to add that it’s even more muddled than that; the boundaries between dream, literature, reality, adventure, traveling, resting, etc. all being more liminal & fluid than is often thought of. Maybe.
I’m way behind on writing (apologies). Anyhow, I’m in New Mexico.
Current as of 29/04 (one month of the Alphabet Dream Circus!) — Tucumcari, NM / 1,786 miles / 93,533 feet climbed