CONTEMPLATIVE CYCLING
"The fact that happiness is associated with relaxation does not mean that it is impossible to be happy in the midst of strenuous effort, for to be truly effective great effort must, as it were, revolve upon a steady, unmoving center. The problem before us is how to find such a center of relaxed balance and poise in man’s individual life – a center whose happiness is unshaken by the whirl that goes on around it, which creates happiness because of itself and not because of external events, and this in spite of the fact that it may experience those events in all their aspects and extremes from the highest bliss to the deepest agony"
Alan Watts
from pg. xxvi,"The Meaning of Happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology and the wisdom of the East" (1940)
"So, I say this, I say all of this, to encourage you, dear reader, to not get so attached to the means but to align with and energize through the pulsations of which I speak, to get outside, to move, and to open, to find the form, your form, that serves as a vehicle for moving meditation whose basic format and whose underlying aim, made up of equal parts instinct and inspiration, relentlessly pursues the innate, yearning desire for body to divinely wed soul.
For soul to plummet into body, for body to soulfully escape its fleshly, earthly, animal-bound prison, for one’s being to not be made of these parts anymore, but to be amalgamated into a unified whole!
Here to convey it as adequately as I can muster, I say, make myself a conduit of these ecstasies of deeper connection that betray that a meaningful order behind our first impressions exists: let me scream from the balconies, sing in the hills, batter down the doors to deliver the message that ‘contemporary mysticism is alive!’
I rejoice! Liberated from the primitive superstitions of our archaic past made up of spirits and daemons and incantations of security and certain desired outcomes, but not condemned to scientific materialism, to the meaningless cosmos, to giving up the belief that there is a design in what we did and said!
At some point, a commitment arose from that matrix from which all things originate: to transcribe these sacred encounters that find me in these still wild places on the fringe of the known. Where it began: in the original experience, in cycling!"
Sarah McKelvey
from "Walking in Nature as Contemporary Mysticism" (rebellesociety.com, July 2019)
