Throwing Yourself into a Messy Future

Is it odd to admit that I am sort of relived that I am both ok from my crash and that I was able to take the crash as feedback that I could use to re-orient my cycling back toward omen bike questing? I finally have reached the end of my 2 month testing journey, and the doctor’s don’t have any answers. I am taking that as feedback that I can move on with my normal life. Consequently, I am taking that crash as a gentle nudge to go back to the roots of my riding where I take my daily little 10-20 mile omen bike quest around my city. Turns out that you have a lot more time for fiber art when you are not going on 60-100 mile rides each weekend.

As an artist dad who also likes to ride bikes, I have had to again come to an understanding in the aftermath of the crash about how I don’t need to do everything at full speed, max effort; Nor do I really want to. It’s just easy to fall prey to old ways of habitual action and thinking. I definitely feel like teenage or college me, who played competitive junior and college tennis and played through misaligned bones, muscle pulls, and shoulder impingements, was at the wheel while I was riding those long rides. I always say that I am a recovering academic to people, but I also think I should tell people I’m a recovering athlete. Just like I don’t want to talk someone’s ear off about my inane research interest as a lay academic now, I also don’t want to push my body to the limits anymore on some quest to prove something to myself. I want to kindly let that part of myself rest after all the years it worked so hard carrying me to college and beyond.

There was a reason for that striving back then. I was hustling to go to college. Yes, it was an expectation that I would go to college, but no one was there to tell me we will take care of the finances. This is the situation that one is confronted with when you are raised by a single mom. My dad couldn’t even help me buy a car or pay child support reliably on time, even though he was a business owner pulling down 6 figures. He even was grumpy helping me fix the beater car I ended up buying to commute to school and tennis. As I look back now, I wonder how much of my striving for that goal to play college was a sort of subconscious fight to make it in college. I mean it paid off. No, I didn’t play division I tennis. Thank Glob for Title 9. I ended up playing for a school in Division III where I was given over 200K in scholarships and grants from the school and the federal government, which was over 90% of the cost of the elite private liberal arts school I attended. The rest I paid for in the 25K in loans, which I paid off with the insurance money my mom handed me from her life insurance policy.

In that context, tennis was more than a game. I sort of shudder saying that, because it’s the reality for so many young men in America that have to play games like blood sports to make it. When I say that it’s easy for me to make moving my body into something more, this is what I mean. I can easily turn an activity that should just be a joyous celebration of moving your body into something darker and more consequential. It has taken getting hit by a car and thrown from the bike that got hit by that car to bring me back to much more mundane horizons with my riding. I can let that part of myself that was trained to sharpen myself into an implement of winning rest now and go on jovial little jaunts to visit ducks. This is the omen bike quest way.

"There was a whole world in front of my eyes I did not see"

Look, I put on a nice shirt for this occasion. WAH-LA! Have you noticed me writing, videoing, and photographing my bicycle rides more? Well, I have been and its been the full flowering of me returning back to the times before the pandemic. I cannot tell you how healing it is to get on my Rivendell Atlantis and just ride, a reference to Grant Peterson’s

A Quiet PracticeJames Gardner Davis

Back in Calling in Sick Magazine Issue 10, I published my first ode to omen bike questing after encountering a fella in a public park who just wanted to share with me how he was seeing the world with new eyes now that he was seeing birds and plants (See link above for access that essay!). In that essay, I defined omen bike questing as:

“An omen bike quest is a ride taken explicitly with the purpose to read the moving landscape or the human or non-human kin we may encounter along the way for messages that one may use to orient their behavior for the coming days, weeks or year. It’s an explicit approach to riding where you think of a bicycle as a divination tool, a tool used discover messages from some other spiritual force.”

When I say I want to get back to omen bike questing, I want to get back to riding as a vital part of my spiritual practice. I want my only goal to be how well I listened or observed the world around me. Keying into that manuscript of everyday life as it unfurls before your two wheels offers you those rare opportunities to let your community of human and non-human kin teach you vital lessons that you need to navigate this current moment. Yes, I do think that all the wisdom you need is literally right outside your door and a short walk or bike ride away.

Why do I believe this? Well, I am always slapped across the face with little messages from the universe when I have the right frame of mind to be listening and looking for them while I am riding. When I drop out of the rat race of trying to prove something to myself riding long and fast, I am always more present to the wisdom that has been right in front of my eyes the whole time. Instead of having a goal of riding X amount of miles, I will set the goal of going to see what’s happening with a waterway, a park, a person, or a shop. Yes, omen bike questing is all about using your own walking or pedal power to weave yourself into the place you live and let it teach you how to be a helpful member of that community.

This was certainly the case on a ride this past week when I underbiked a gravel section of the Sand Creek Greenway on my Rivendell Bleriot.1 As I was riding along, I felt an urge to pull off the creek trail and overlook the trail via a pedestrian bridge crossing in Sand Creek Park. As I reached the middle of the bridge, I looked east and saw four ducks slowly meandering westword with the gentle current of the creek. I stood there watching them ease their way down the creak until they disappeared under the bridge.

As any normal person would, I jumped to the otherside of the bridge, waiting for the ducks to emerge on the other side. As I waited, I noticed some blockages of fallen trees had made some dams across the creek that would made the duck’s passage difficult. I wondered how the ducks would tackle these obstacles. With grace and ease, the ducks circled for a moment, considering their options. Then, one of the ducks selected a passage, jumped up on some branches, and jumped into the makeshift canals that had formed from other creatures making their way toward the South Platte River. Down they went toward the messy future we are all living into.

“Huzzah! Isn’t that interesting”, I thought to myself. This is precisely how we too can navigate this current moment, full of countless obstacles in our path, that we find ourselves in. We can circle, consider our options, select a pathway given those that are available to us, and throw ourselves with passionate abandon down the pathway toward the future. There is no perfect pathway. All we have are the messy options that are available to us 248 years into this imperfect American experiment while pursuing democracy and equality for all. Me, I choose to be like the ducks and continue to throw myself into the mundane work of serving my community and keeping my friends’ and family’s spirits high. Even with all the obstacles thrown in my way, I won’t back down from this plodding work of showing up for my community or kin. I hope you won’t either, even with how dark this moment is. That’s the omen bike quest way!

I am so grateful for this moment with the ducks and their willingness to teach me this little lesson. Even with all the difficulty that I have endured, I am so thankful for my crash that brought me back to this place of being able to listen and observe. I am thankful for Grant Peterson, whose Rivendell bikes and his book Just Ride, have opened up whole new worlds of body movement to me. I am thankful for Jeremy, who sold me his Rivendell Bleriot that carried me to the bridge. I am thankful for Adam at Calling in Sick who took a shot on a weirdo like me and published my piece on omen bike questing. Most of all, I am thankful for you, dear reader, for showing up for me just as I show up for you each week. I hope you can consider the paths available to you this weekend, choose one, and throw yourself into the work of building the future!

That’s all for this week, dear reader! I hope you enjoyed and are inspired to go out on a bike or two feet and see what the world has to teach you! Please do share any lessons that you found along the way! I would love to know.

Best,

James