Jumble-aya

On my bicycle. A Sunday, last day of November. Sun and clouds, clouds starting to win. Wind picking up from the north, the bottom of a Colorado storm nipping into the top of New Mexico. Flakes about to fly. I'm in shorts and a sweater, a smart wool cap and sunglasses, gliding by the still dark dirt of the fields of Taos' lowlands, sugary snow sprinkled into the furrows and between the toes of the cottonwoods edging the potholed road. Abandoned adobes look shut up and shivery, waiting for spring and new mud. No other bikers on the streets, save the two stick-thin boys with long blond hair wearing t-shirts and loose jeans, glistening red lips and laughter, doing wheelies off the curb of the main road near the do-it-yourself car wash. We had a nod passing in different directions.

There's a smell of burning pinon logs throughout the neighborhoods. I've a heavy backpack on and pass what was an overgrown field in the summer, filled with insect hum and ground dragging critters, but now looks like a place I could roll into if I had to, hide myself under the tentacled limbs and stiff stalks, put on my jacket and sleep on my pack. You think of these things on a bike, on a cold day with a pack on your back; where can you dismount and rest, sleep without freezing or being rousted as a trespasser or startled by a wild dog in the middle of the night? And it feels good to think that you can. My goatee is now thick and long, and keeps my chin and neck warm. Although I'm still on antibiotics, I have enough strength to pump the pedals and feel warm enough from the exertion. When I hit the shadows again, under the sprawling trees of Ranchitos, the road is icy and I remember seeing John Nichols yesterday on the trail, smiling as always, his body dancing jauntily like a puppet as his hands thrust out his hiking poles for purchase. Showing up. He's always there, on his way down as I make my way up. Always with a hello and those rosy cheeks, and clockwork happiness knowing that he's just warming up for a good night's write. He's committed, completely committed to the writing life, down to the cells. It seems like the only way to do it. I remember John, who is prolific and punctual, and hearty after several heart attacks, because he is the symbol of the antidote to the wanting of last evening. It is the battle of evermore and he has been winning it. I'm sure the battle raged harder for him 20 and 30 years ago, in fact, I know it did. No matter, he still wrote the night through virtually every night of his life and still found the time to hunt and fish and hike, befriend the locals, understand the customs, the flora and fauna, the history of this place. He enmeshed himself in the dirt and the changing clouds, the light. I see enjoyment on his face, not the need for the preciousness. It's all around us here. And I know I'm idealizing John, but I see him all the time, and he doesn't know this, but he is a guide for me. There's this part of me, and he shouts very loudly, that I will be giving up too much to settle into my writer self. That was the battle last night, and that is the ring, which must be destroyed. There is an excitement in me, an ardor for the life of words and breath and sending on the sensations and understandings that happen as I live. It's a jumbled soup and in frittered times the jumble lives upon itself and cannot be untangled because it takes a sitting, a walking, a contemplation of sky and heartbeat and the nexis of everything. The jumble of it all being too much. You can pick up the Sunday Times - and don't think that wasn't my first thought today, before meditation, before I watched the yoga instruction on PBS, before I read an article in the New Yorker, and then lolled on the bench at the World Cup - and in that newsprint you can read the jumble, a puzzle piece at a time, and even read it cover-to-cover, which for me requires being ill, and I doubt it will coalesce without the sitting. John Nichols sits. There are others I know that sit, or they teach yoga, and they have a gleam in their eyes that is muscular yet effortless, eyes open wider than most, not in surprise but wonder.

But I don't want to get too far into that. I'm in the jumble (welcome to the jumble?) without the Times, post-its littering my kitchen table, about to move, a football game to watch in an hour, a tooth to be pulled tomorrow morning, a list of attitudes of mindfulness staring at me, a caffeine buzz keeping my left foot jiggling, work beckoning and a sense of disorganization pervading. The bright side is I could be darting around my house right now accomplishing nothing, over-breathing and waiting to hit the proverbial wall. But I'm here at the keys typing, inspired by a bike ride, and John Nichols, and feeling like I'll make it to Mt. Doom and destroy this fucking ring if it takes me this entire life.