Lucky takes a think break on a mountain wildflower pillow

I had another of those funny think things. “Respect yourself and others will respect you.” I asked Claire what that word respect means. She took a long time with her thinks before she said something. “Respect means you think well of someone, and that you trust what they say is what they will do.”  That sounds good. I thinked there might be more.  She heard my think, “Respect takes a long time to happen, she said. ” My head hurt, but I wanted to hear more. “To respect yourself, means to be honest so you know you are a good person, or uh, panda.” I had a think that I want to be a good panda. “If you act right, so you can respect yourself, then other people, and pandas, will see that and respect you.”  That was a long think, and I’ll think on it more. I like this think.

I think these thinks are coming from someone else. I’m not that smart by myself. It’s probably not a panda. We just think about bamboo. I wonder if it is a China person? Does anybody know who thinked these thinks first?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB51NKMxi7s

Lucky's First Thoughts

I must have bumped my head pretty hard when ended up in the middle of the road, before Bob and Claire rescued me.  My head has been feeling funny, not hurting, just funny. Well, after that last fast bicycle ride, the words up above just popped into my fluff filled head.

I told Bob, and his face went white. He said it was scary that a stuffed panda was doing something he called, thinking.

After little bit, he said he had an idea what the words meant: That a person (or panda?) should really do stuff, rather than hear about it or see it. He said it is the reason they travel, and hike and bicycle, instead of watch other people do stuff on television. I think I remember such a thing called a television from my other life. The people were always sitting quietly in front of it They might have been doing this thinking thing, but I couldn’t tell.

I think I like moving better than sitting, but I like doing this new thing they call thinking too.

Does anyone know where my thought came from?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSXQJK57tus

Bob Says Writer's Block is Normal

Hi big people, and maybe some little ones. This is Lucky again. Did you see my first blog? Bob and Claire rescued me from the middle of a remote highway. I don’t remember how I got there. I hope my memory comes back. Bob took a fake picture of me in the road and was caught by the flashing lights guys. Claire laughed herself sick. I think Bob is good at making a fool of himself.

Bob and Claire told me my life with them would be adventurous. The next day they began to show me how to ride a bicycle. Something about China and bicycles seems to go get them all excited, and it looks like I might be a part of what they have planned.

I wish she'd look where she's going!

Riding in Bob's Olympic Peninsula Bicyclists Jersey

Yikes, Too Fast!

We went to a high place called Lizard Head. It was cold. It was even colder coming back down in Claire’s pocket. I’m not too sure about this bicycling stuff. I heard Claire say it would be a lot more of a high place in China and even colder.

Me at Lizard Pass

Brrrrrr

I think they want us to do a lot more of this high and cold places as practice for China. At least they promised some other fun stuff in between.

Last night it got so cold in the motorhome that the skylight was all frosty and it was cold inside. I wish they would invite me into their bed on cold nights. But there are already three other pandas there, and they have seniority. Maybe later.

Frosty Morning

When I landed on my head in the road I think it made me all funny. Now I think all the time. I didn’t used to think. And I listen to Bob and Claire and wonder how humans think, and what makes them do the things they do. I get hints that Bob and Claire might not be like lots of humans. Like the three pandas they talk to and sleep with, and all that hard breathing and sore muscles they get from those bicycles. They laugh a lot too, and they just snuggle closer when it gets cold. I think they have some stories to tell me. But for now I think we’re just supposed to have fun, and get ready for China.

Last night I heard them whispering about a China place. I thought they said, “Shangri-La.” But I can’t be sure. It might have been my imagination.

I love the monsoon, with warm dry mornings, exciting skies building slowly by late morning, lightning and thunder by late afternoon, and a good downpour by sunset, and a cool night for sleeping. I like the power and semi-predictability of it, and the break from solid blue skies. Here are some pictures from our summer jaunt last year. More coming in later posts before the real thing next month.

Wupatki

The French accent did not disguise the intent of the word our languages share from the Latin.

Whirrrrrr clunk clunk, gone. The melon sized rock, descending a French Alp at terminal velocity, would have taken my head off, had I not been fully attentive at that moment, and hugged vertical ice encrusted rock with the intensity of a lover.

Climbing vertical rock and ice has a way of acutely focusing attention and releasing an delicious sense of aliveness. A mid-life crisis in my early thirties, sent me off to Europe to spend a summer trying to kill myself doing obscenely difficult Alpine routes, with just a few climbs on a small rock in West Virginia under my belt. I survived somehow, and learned one of my most valuable lessons, the value of attention to this life.

This seemingly basic concept of attention deserves a closer look.

From Wikipedia:
William James, in his textbook Principles of Psychology, remarked:
“ Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.[2]

I wonder if our increasing tendency to multi-task (I am guilty) is robbing us of the ability to, and affinity for, focusing on the precious intense moments of living that are within our grasp daily.

If our brain is trying to accomplish several things at once, something is lost, and that something is the intense pleasure to be had from focusing on one thing; one simple, beautiful piece of, or moment in, the universe.

I don’t want to focus on the negatives of multi-tasking, but on the rewards of attention:

The day I am writing this, my wife Claire and I, rode our bicycles to Ski Valley in the Santa Catalina Mountains behind Tucson.

We began at sunrise in saguaros heavy with white blossoms, and a faint acrid scent of creosote, both signatures of the Sonora Desert, and ended at nearly 9,000 feet in aspens, and the eager gobbling of a turkey in the deep forest. Along the way, the saguaros gave way to bushy oaks and the scent of dry grass, then the gin smell of juniper and vanilla of ponderosa pines, punctuated by the liquid descending call of a canyon wren, and finally the clean sharpness of spruce and thin air. You get the idea, I was paying attention, close attention, to the subtle changes of climate zones that span from Mexico to Canada, all in three hours.

Of course we could have driven it in a motor vehicle much more quickly, and we do sometimes, but we would have missed most of the smells and all of the sounds, and the involvement of our bodies.

Muscles working against gravity have a way of demanding one’s attention, and contrary to popular perception, the sensation is mostly pleasant, if focused on instead of trying to ignore the “pain”. Pain and pleasure can be interchangeable with attention and attitude.

On the way down, the sense of speed was intensified by gusts tugging at the light bicycle and skinny tires; attention is not only rewarding, but required. Forty, or even fifty miles per hour on a bicycle is pure joy, if just on the edge of scary.

At a rest stop for a snack, and to enjoy a view of the city, Claire was using her water bottle to wash a bug from her eye. I got close to see if it was gone. The aliveness and attention of our day together coalesced into a desire to hold her, and I did. I focused my attention where our damp bodies met, the smell of her hair, the sun on my back. And I told her something very personal that I had been wanting to tell her about my desires for the end of my life. I’m not sure any other combination of circumstances would have led me to that revelation.

Life is only fully appreciated through attention, sometimes attention to emotion.

This subject deserves more than I am giving to it now. Perhaps I will come back to it later. For now, those muscles I used so fully, are demanding me to give full attention to a fade into a long deep sleep.

The figures are all veterans; note the truck coming out of the alley, “of America.”

Berries and floaters along the Cannon Falls to Red Wing rail trail

Claire riding the trail

Okay. I was wrong. I can stand the heat and humidity of the Upper Midwest. Everything looks, and feels, better from the seat of a bicycle. We spent a day riding the Cannon Falls to Red Wing, Minnesota rail trail, a round trip of about 42 miles. On a bicycle, you sweat, and you move fast (if it’s flat) and the two combine to cool a body; one of the most wonderful things about traveling on a bicycle, as we have relearned so many times all over the world in 100F+ heat in Australia, Turkey and even Tucson. It’s only one of the best things about bicycling, but one of the best.

The trail runs along a small river (Cannon) popular with floaters; that’s what I call people who get on inner-tubes, lubricate themselves with beer and burn themselves ripe red in glorious lazy relaxation. We’ll do that someday, maybe when we visit the Big Rapids crew later this month! We took pictures and waved. We were cool, they were cool, but they probably thought we were roasting pedaling bikes, wrong, particularly since we were in the shade, and it was only about 90!

On the Mississippi waterfront, we met a couple boondocked in their motorhome in the grain-truck staging area overlooking a small marina, and decided to come back and join them for the night, and the breeze off the river made sleeping tolerable although Claire had trouble with the constant train traffic. The next morning we strolled around the small town of Red Wing (think boots) and enjoyed the old buildings and the revival we have seen in so many small downtowns. I predict urban dwellers will be swarming these small towns, buying up condos built in old manufacturing buildings, banks and mercantile spaces. As soon as high-speed-internet, fine coffee, restaurants, wine shops, regional music and theatre arrive, what’s to miss from the big city? Well, a Trader Joe’s would be nice. We had an interesting conversation with an employee (dressed as an executive) about Red Wing shoes making most of its shoes in China, except the work-boot line. Hmmmm, Guess who buys work-boots in America?

Red Wing Boots all over town, and beautiful flowers

We’ve traveled in some of those countries who make our stuff for us and those people need the jobs making stuff for us, more than our workers need the jobs. If we don’t help spread our wealth by moving manufacturing jobs to those places, those people are going to be joining the current batch of border-crossers, pounding at our door, wanting the good life we show them on the television shows and movies we sell to them now. Which do we want to do, move manufacturing jobs to the people who desperately need the work, or have them come here by the millions? Seems like a no-brainer to me. I know it is more complex than that, but not much.

Red Wing waterfront

Wisconsin has entirely too many No Overnight Parking signs. What are they so worried about? Do they think we are doing immoral things in our little motorhome quietly parked in their roadside park. These signs make me feel like a gypsy, unwanted, and usually leads me to be sure and spend as little money as possible in a place, and move on. We moved turtle twice in Bayfield to sleep, and were not noticed. After what we dropped on the kayak trip, they can’t complain, not to mention the two ice cream cones one night!

The heat, threatening 100 (with humidity) drove us to Lake Superior for a little relief. The first day was still way to hot and sleeping was difficult. So we decided to splurge on a day kayak trip along the Superior coast to look at some sea caves and cool off. We were going to rent a kayak, but it was more expensive than a tour: go figure. See pictures. I got water between my UV filter (for water protection) and most of the photos are fogged! Lesson learned.

Honeymooners!

Monday July 10. Yesterday we rode a 56-mile loop of the Bayfield Peninsula with some of the few hills we have seen in Wisconsin, for probably 2,000 feet of climbing, a nice day in cooling weather. We enjoyed the small town of Cornucopia, in particular the country store. It is too far out of the way to be too touristy, yet. We stoped to cool beside a small waterfall just before the eight-mile hill.

Store at Cornucopia, WI.