Zen and motorbikes

All that has happened over last year has meant a lot of changes to my life. I am now retired and a full time carer with two people to look after. I don't have to got to work each day, now I can stay at home and the work is waiting for me when I wake up and when I go to bed at night a lot of it is still there not done. I miss not going to work, I miss the machinery and the kids and the staff. I miss being able to go and make what I think the store needs. I miss the escape from the house and the domestic world. Yet I was glad enough to get home to it when I was working. Strange about that. All this talk about bikers and bikies made me realize something that I hadn't really grasped before. Talking about the world of the outlaw biker and the one percenters and what sort of things happen in that circle has made me understand that I miss the bikes more than anything else that I have had to give up.

Sea knows the lure of the bike, perhaps without being able to articulate it, and she has only been for one pillion ride. It would be surprising if Sea could articulate the lure, for many have tried and no one has yet succeeded. It is indescribable, the sense of freedom and yet, at the same time, the feeling of unity. On a bike, I am removed from the restraints of this world and united with things that are important. When I read that back, it's the wrong way round. I am not removed from the restraints, rather they are removed from me and I am absorbed by a different world and in being absorbed, I am set truly free.

Gibran put it probably as well as any writer of my aquaintance. In "the Prophet" he speaks of death and ends with these words, "..............Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. and when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance".

When I say "another world", I dont mean it in the sense of the outlaw world compared with the world that you and I live in. The outlaw world is an adaption of what we consider "The Norm". No, this other world is a totally difference experience, it is not merely a change to what we have here, it is a radical new existance on a different level of awarenes. True, the old world is still there, you have to ride with due caution and care, but that world is overlayed by the sheer magic and beauty of this new existance and I am not a spectator, I do not sit back and watch this new world unfold. On the contrary, I am very much a participant in this new order, I am part of the unfolding.

Some people say that they understand why it can't be explained. It is because the experience is to vague and etherial and language is to precise. But that is not the case, indeed, it is the other way around. The experience is very precise, it is language that is etherial. C. S. Lewis, in his Voyage to Venus, talks of the Oyarsa of Malacandra as being a rod of light not quite vertical to the floor. He corrects himself and says that the floor is not horizontal to the rod of light which seems to have reference to some standard outside our spatial limits. This goes some of the way to describing how I feel about riding. The world of roads and traffic and oil patches is still there and I am aware of that world, but I am seeing it from outside, I am looking into that world from another that is outside the spatial limitations that you and I are accustomed to.

So while I can't ride the cruiser, I'll take the opportunity to do a bit of rebuilding. A few of the gaskets need replacing, there is some rewiring to be done and maybe a touchup on the paint job here and there. I'd like to fit a good set of flamethrowers as well, so now is a good a time as any. Then, when all this is over, what time is the morning service at Leongatha? Look out Donna, I'll just show up one morning and see if I can prise Ron off his cat. Exchange two hulls for two wheels.

Desolation

Do I really want to do this? I have to have some way of letting it out. The hurt and the resentment, the hate, the bitterness. I don't hate people, not really. It isn't people that wont heal Kaye, it's god. And now we have Geoff here as well. He is sick and they dont know why. How often has we prayed for them, how many times does Kaye have to be annointed and blessed, how frequently does Geoff have to be prayed for, how long do we have to keep on asking before something is done.
Once upon a time, there was a small ant nest in the back yard. It was no better and no worse than any other ant nest really, but the ants that lived there, well they just knew that is was the most wonderful nest in all of antdom. Didn't they have the fiercest soldiers guarding the entrance, inspecting everything that came in and the Regimental Sergeant Major was the most savage of all. His pincers gleamed, they were so polished. And sharp? hey nobody fooled with them.
The foragers went further than any other colonies did looking for food and the loads that the scavengers could carry back were huge, they'd break the back of any other ant.
And the queen, well she was beautiful. she lived in her royal chamber waited on and served by her maids who groomed her and fed her so that she could concentrate on her job of laying eggs. Boy, could she lay eggs. Thousands of them were taken each day to the nursery where they were tended and cared for by devoted nurses until they finally hatched and started on their preordained job.
Didn't they have a wise council of elders to govern them, made up of the older, more experienced ants who were so wise you could be sure there was nothing they didn't know. So the life of the colony flowed on day by day with everything running smoothly.
Then one day, water started pouring down the entry and it flooded the heating chambers at the bottom of the nest where just enough rubbish was put to generate just enough methane to control the temperature. And the elders of the council sent for the weather ant, whose job it was to warn the nest of impending rain so that the dam walls could be built up to safeguard the colony. And the weather ant went, trembling with fear, before the council and the Chairant said to the weather ant in a very loud voice, "Weather ant, why did you fail in your duty. It is your job to warn us of rains and yet you did not do this and now the nest is flooding". The weather ant replied in a very small and squeeky voice, "Mr Chairant, I did not fail in my duty, there were no signs in the sky that foretold rain, in fact, if you look up now, you will see that the sky is clear and blue without a cloud in sight". They all looked up through the entrance and indeed they saw that the weather ant was correct, there were no clouds, the sky was blue. So they took counsel among themselves and voted on a resolution to go and inspect this phenomenon further. The entire council went outside the nest and inspected the situation. They saw a small boy a few yards away from the nest, playing with a hose. He was making rivers and dams, creating waterways and streams as small boys will sometimes. and one of those streams was leading straight to the nest and flooding it. "So", said the Chairant, "that is why our home is being flooded. We must put a stop to this at at once". So the Chairant bussled over to the small boy and said, in his very loudest voice, "Small boy, small boy, would you please turn off your hose, you are flooding our home. Or if you cant turn it off, would you please direct the stream away from our nest"? But the antvoice was too tiny for even a very small boy to hear, so the Chairant called over the rest of the council and they all shouted in their very loudest voices, "Small boy, small boy would you please not flood our home or you will destroy it and we shall surely die". But the small boy still did not hear them, and even if he had heard them, he did not speak ant so would not have known what they were saying. He played on, making rivers and streams, directing water where he wanted it to go, round a clump of grass, along a ditch scratched in the dirt with a stick, under a bridge that he had built, past a small stone that looked like a big rocky outcrop and into the hole in the ground. He didnt know what it was doing after that, how it was flooding the heating chamber and rising higher flooding the nursery where the frantic nurses were tryin to move the eggs to safer ground, but there was no safer ground. It flooded the royal chamber, where the queen was trapped, unable to move, because of her size and her maids were too small to shift her and the entry was too small to let her out. So she drowned. The water rose higher still, flooding the dormitories where the workers slept and even flooding the guard house just inside the entrance. The Regimental Sargeant Major snapped at the water with his razor sharp pincers, but it was no use, the water kept on coming. The nest was flooded and all the ants had no home and no queen. So the colony died. And the small boy went inside to have his tea.

Sometimes I am one of those ants and that small boy is god.