Whenever I wear this bike jersey by Cycology, (pronounced “psychology”) and inspired by Frida Kahlo, I almost—without fail—get a compliment (i.e., a car passenger boldly yells, “I LIKE YOUR SHIRT!”) Everybody loves Frida!
Yesterday, the crossing guard checking out my kit + gear asked, “Do you do this every morning?”
I assumed she meant riding my bike.
I nodded.
“Good for you.”
I smiled. “Yes, it’s good for me.”
I thought about the slightly and likely different meaning between her statement and mine.
It is good for me. As in “doing good.” I don’t want to overstate anything, but throwing my leg over my bike and peddling isn’t a trivial, self-indulgent activity, although judgy types might beg to differ.
My bike saves me.
It’s psychology.
“Exercise is the most potent and underutilized antidepressant, and it’s free.”—Unknown
Yesterday, I was given the easy or hard option on the “Spitfire” trail in Las Flores.
I’ve had enough hard, so I veered left and took the “easy.”
The easy wasn’t easy.
Who decides what’s easy?
And like the wooden plaque on my bathroom wall, who decides or defines what’s “OK” in “…everything is going to be OK”?
I’m now finding “OK” might be what Hebrews 11 points to, and maybe even Frida.
Downhill, super-narrow, rocky, single-track trails with hairpin turns (especially hairpin turns) alongside sheer, long-drop-off cliffs aren’t my favorite. Once, I went over the side and landed several yards upside down, like the upside-down Delta plane this week. Thank God we all survived. I was saved by a prickly bush on a Santa Monica Mountain slope, which broke my fall.
I’ve been landing on a lot of thorny bushes the last—I wanna say, four—years. I’ll spare you the list.
Discombobulated—I remove the visible briars, scratch, crawl, and climb, sometimes towing a heavy mountain bike UP.
I’d love a softer place to fall.
A few days ago, I was given one. I fell into a dark chocolate fudge mud pit. It looked delicious.
I lost my shoes in it.
I, no kidding—immediately thought about what Thich Nhat Hanh said about the lotus plant that grows in the mud.
Is it just me, or am I sprouting?
In his book, The Art of Transforming Suffering,’ he writes, “Most people are afraid of suffering. But suffering is a kind of mud to help the lotus flower of happiness grow. There can be no lotus without the mud.”
Sorry Thich, I might replace the word “happiness” because happiness is cheap and fleeting. I might use words like joy, faith, harmony, salvation, liberation, emancipation, peace, “internal harmony,” “fully embraced life,” “interior freedom” and even what the Hindus call Moksha.
Alchemy.
But “There can be no lotus without the mud”? Spot on.
My sister told me this week that the root word of excruciating is “cross,” pointing to Jesus. The web says, “Excruciating comes from two Latin words: ex cruciatus, or out of the cross. Crucifixion was the defining word for pain.”
In our health-and-wealth, abundance-seeking-expecting, Prosperity Gospel meets The Secret culture, embracing suffering sounds unhealthy to masochistic.
Do we want to be like Jesus or not?
In his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller writes:
“We can recover a faith in grief that recognizes that grief is not here to take us hostage, but instead to reshape us in some fundamental way, to help us become our mature selves, capable of living in the creative tension between grief and gratitude. In so doing, our hearts are ripened and made available for the great work of loving our lives and this astonishing world. It is an act of soul activism.”
I want to be known as a soul activist. Can I just put that out there right now? If I have no choice but to occasionally, even consistently, fall upside down into a briar bush or deep into the thick Thich mud—not feeling the slightest bit OK in the moment, I want to reach up toward faith. I want transformation from suffering into meaning.
My Cycology jersey is inspired by the paintings of Frida Kahlo and Day de los Muertos. For a long time, The Day of the Dead images didn’t resonate with me. But I see it differently now.
It’s said that these images are a reflection between life and death, “memento mori”—life is fleeting, we have limitations, and we will one day die. I heard John Mark Comer, author of Practicing the Way, say he keeps a memento mori skull on his desk as a reminder. This idea of that used to creep me out. Now, it distills things down to the most essential elements. It’s an alchemy.
And nature.
I want to be the lotus.
When I landed in the mud, it wasn’t the classic idea of “knee-deep”—I wasn’t submerged from my toes to my knees, but it looked that way—and even that exaggerated, false image can get you stuck.
Here’s what was true in the mud.
I landed on my knees
as in prayer.
“A heart that works is a heart that hurts.”—Juliana Hatfield
