Ride To enlightenment

Ride To Enlightenment:

This title for this log of my annual cross country motorcycle trip may sound a little grandiose just to describe a simple ride from northern Virginia to Colorado and back. However, things that appear simple on the surface can often produce an event that is very important, sometimes life changing, and on rare occasions, nothing less than a turning point for one’s soul. This trip included one of those rare events.

I therefore plan to say very little to say about the journey on the bike, which means avoiding my usual attempts to make you laugh by describing the hours spent cursing the heavy, often torrential, rains at the beginning of the trip, or working hard to find the right words to describe the breathtaking snow capped Rocky mountain scenery I encountered in the middle of it, or finally, describing the interesting people I met whose lives I got to interact with for a few moments at every stop along the way.

Instead, I will ask you to read about several events that occurred within just a few hours during the fourth day of the journey, less than sixteen hours of elapsed time that produced within me, a wholly new perspective of life.

My trip this year was delayed, almost canceled, after my 92 years old mother fell in her apartment, and my middle daughter experienced premature labor with her second child. At first, I was hesitant to go, somewhat afraid, and feeling guilty about leaving my unsettled family, but I am lucky to be blessed with a wife that really understands my need to get away each year on a journey where I try to shed both life induced, and self induced stress. For me, long distance motorcycle riding is cathartic, because it is one of the few times where present moment living can effectively drown out those ruminating voices in my head that are incessant in reminding me of past failures and future worries.

Leaving Virginia several days later than planned, I narrowed my itinerary and set just two small goals for this trip. The first was to stop in a small town in southern Colorado to visit, Kim, the grown daughter of an old neighbor and friend, a young woman who spent countless hours at our house playing with my three daughters when she was growing up and who now, thirty some years later remains a friend. The second objective was to meet up in northern Nevada with my motorcycle riding buddy and college friend, Jim who was returning from a trip to California. Somewhere near Reno we would meet and then start our riding journey together back to our homes on the east coast.

Those of you that have suffered through my previous motorcycle journals know that I do not like rain, that I do not like dust covered gravel roads, and that I hate and fear when they join in combination. Falling off my motorcycle three times in the Yukon and Alaska mud has solidified that fear into what some might describe as an irrational paranoia.
That fear is so real to me, however, that I am not even ashamed to admit it, because mud, my riding skill, and an almost thousand pound motorcycle with slick tires has not always produced a positive outcome for both my ego and my aging body.

On day four of my journey, and in the late afternoon, I arrived at the turnoff to the tiny town of Crestone, in southern Colorado. The town, which sits adjacent to the Great Sand dunes national park, is nestled at the western base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and the scenery is not over described by using the term breathtaking. Fourteen thousand foot high snow covered peaks rise on one side of the valley, and similar mountain peaks are on the other side of the eighty five hundred foot high, miles wide plateau.

My plan was to have dinner with Kim and catch up on what has happened in the past several years of her life before heading toward Nevada the next morning, so I had made a reservation to stay at a small bed and breakfast inn outside of town, which was located high up on one of the hills at the base of the mountains.
After making the room reservation the previous night, I discovered on the inn’s web site that the last half-mile of travel up the mountain would be on a dirt and gravel road, and my “fear of mud” alarm started buzzing.

All of the day up to that point had been mostly sunny, just a few cumulus clouds dotting a clear azure blue sky which seemed just a shade darker, but much clearer at the high altitude. As I descended into the valley and then turned off the main highway toward town, a very local, but heavy, rain shower began behind me and seemed intent on chasing me along the road into town. My almost primal fear of mud and motorcycles came in play as I started up the gravel road, and I was more than a fair amount relieved, actually I was overjoyed, that my repetitive prayers, in the form of pleading to my creator were answered, and the rain ceased just before I came to a stop at the small, five-room Inn.

The town of Crestone is known as a spiritual and new age retreat center, and it is populated with several dozen diverse organizations ranging from a Hindu temple and several Tibetan centers, to a Japanese spiritual group dedicated to natural agriculture. For those of you that are fans of the, “Lost” TV show, there is also a “Dharma Foundation” somewhere up on the hills. Crestone has been called “little Tibet” by some people, in recognition of the stunning beauty of the surrounding mountains and the spiritual feel many get when they go there. Being a spiritual center, it attracts true believers of the faiths and organizations represented, as well as individuals who are running away from the reality of a modern world they do not understand and therefore fear. Monks, hippies and drug addicts intermingle in a town located in the morning shadow of a mountain where long-term residents believe “the veil is thin,” a term used to indicate that in Crestone, the spirit world resides very close to the physical world we live in, and that boundary can be easily, and unknowingly crossed.

I was warned about that by the innkeeper Marcia, and also by my young friend, Kim, but to a sixty three year old retired engineer, those words, “The Veil is Thin,” were more than slightly outside the boundary of my rational mind.

Although I was raised in a loosely practicing Methodist household, my adult religious philosophy had migrated to what I call an appropriate mix of standard Christianity, new age philosophy, and a large dose of quantum physics. I believe in a creator that granted us “free will:” a world, in which by exercising that free will we can influence, and maybe even create the reality we live in, and that all possibilities exist within the quantum soup surrounding us. I said I believe in it, but until that day in Crestone I had never really lived it, and more important, I had never really exercised the real intent of “free will.”

My friend Kim showed me the area, and then we went to dinner where I caught up with her life, shared what was happening in my family, and listened to her description of what the town of Crestone was all about. I took several pictures of her using a very expensive digital camera loaned to me by my daughter and son-in law. The term “expensive” here means mid digit thousands, so I was being very careful not to drop it: At least at first.

After dinner, and in the dark, she drove me back to the inn, and by the time we started up the hill it was raining, and by the time we got to the inn it was raining hard, with the dust covered graveled road slowly turning into my nightmare. Kim helped me carry a few things to my room, and as we climbed the rain drenched outside stairs, I commented about my fear of mud covered gravel roads, and my fear of dropping the expensive camera that had been loaned to me and that I was trying to protect from the heavy rain.

When I opened the door, I took one step forward, and I found myself almost floating in mid air as my foot caught the threshold sending me sprawling forward. My first thought was the camera in my hand, so I held it out and up to keep it away from the floor that was coming to meet me, but I had not noticed the table in front of me, and as my body came crashing to the floor, the camera crashed hard against the wooden table before it too fell to the floor.

I got up and picked up the camera and did what all engineers do to see if something is working, I shook it, and I was greeted with a sound of something loose, something broken. I am sure that Kim could see the fear grow on my face as I took picture after picture with the camera, varying all settings and seeing nothing but a deep black image covering the display. I spent a few minutes trying everything, before I looked over at Kim and heard her say, “ I told you ‘the veil is thin’ here, I cannot believe how fast you manifest your fears.”

A broken, five thousand dollar camera in my hand, hard pelting rain outside turning the dust on the gravel road into mud, and she was saying this was my fault, my doing. I did not believe in very much of anything at that moment other than I hated the town of Crestone and was very sorry that I had come.

After Kim left, I tried the camera another dozen times, and the same black display greeted me, and the image’s histogram was blank indicating there was no output from the digital sensor when exposed to light. I went to bed in despair and spent the next four hours laying awake, listening to the heavy rain outside, wondering how I was going to get down the hill in the morning, and worrying how I would tell my daughter and son-in-law that I had broken their camera.
I was in one of those, “poor me, why me, the world sucks,” states until two-thirty in the morning, and I was not much into the concept that we create our own reality, especially since the next part of that equation had me falling off my motorcycle in the mud and watching it careen down the hill without me.

At two thirty in the morning I was praying for the rain to stop, and I heard the statement in my head, “The veil is thin here.” I stopped praying to the ultimate creator, and concentrated on the other creator, and that would be me. I said, “The rain will stop.” And it did, and it never started again throughout the night. When I woke in the morning the sun was out, and the mountain air had dried the road from the heavy rain that had fallen during the night.

Feeling more positive in my outlook, I tried the camera and was disappointed that it still did not work but not surprised, because my mind was telling me the rain stopped because the storm passed, and I had nothing to do with it. At that moment I did not care why, I was just thankful, and I went to the breakfast room in the inn.

Marcia, the owner of the Coll House Inn was in the kitchen and one other guest came in shortly after I say down. Marcia is one of those individuals who you want to start a conversation with: A very interesting history in standard medicine, homeopathic medicine and not surprisingly new age thinking. Stay at her inn if you go to Crestone.

We started talking about the town, the beliefs of its various residents, those both functional and dysfunctional, why people believe the place is “special,” and how we both can’t subscribe to the Buddhist philosophy of “suffering.” “Been there, done that,” was her view.

We started talking about what it really means when she and other residents use the term, “The veil is thin here,” to describe Crestone, and after a lively discussion, I shared my story of the rain and the broken camera as possible examples of manifesting one’s fears.

She shook her head and said, “the veil IS thin here: You can manifest not only what you fear but what you want.”

In the time it took me to walk back to my room I went from a practical engineer to a believer in my own philosophy. I stopped the rain, and I could fix the camera. Somewhat heady thinking for an engineer and probably bordering on the obnoxious to most of my friends, but it did not matter, because I believed it. Not just said it, but believed it. Not just wanted it, but believed it. And for the first time I knew the difference

I picked the camera up and said to myself, “before the end of the day, this camera will work,” and I took a picture. The image looked completely black, it still did not work, and the histogram appeared as blank as the night before. But here is the life changing experience, because I was not discouraged. I knew, I mean I really knew it would work before the end of the day, so I took another picture. An image of the mountain outside my window was on the screen, and I felt pleased but not surprised when the next images taken were perfect, the slight rattle in the camera now gone, along with a lot of my preconceived notions of the reality of my life. “Free will,” took on a much greater meaning than before.

I don’t expect all of you reading this tale to accept that we create our own reality, even though I do, but for a few of you I will ask you to look at the images from the camera that I took that morning. The real story is told in the middle image, the one I took after I knew I fixed it; the image I thought was blank. It is not. And the dark grey image with no detail, and a histogram that showed the sensor starting to work tell it all for me. You can make up your own mind about what happened to me and that is what “Free will” is all about.

I learned a lot more that morning, most of it from an incredible young lady named Kim, but that is another story for a later time.