Zen and the Art of Holy Cross Trail

You know what they ain't doing?

They ain't a kiddin', boys. They ain't a kiddin'.

You ought to see the rest of me. Shit.

You know, a man needs a handlebar that he can lean on, but my leanin' post has done left and gone. When you hear a creaking in your headset, make sure you take that seriously. It won't let you down under normal circumstances, but it sure will fail when you're making a high angle drop down into a nice little arroyo. Then you got to pay the price. Oh lord.

That damn bar started giving, plunging forward from the stresses of the four foot drop I shouldn't have been making on an under-equipped bike. Then it went all the way over and I had no type of control. I rolled three times and I only come up twice. Luckily my face didn't take the hit. The rest of me feels a little worse for wear. I lost some blood here and there. It's amazing how much of our civilized lives keep wearing on with no real pain or loss. We whine about our jobs and our loves. We whine about all the gas price bullshit we're spoon-fed by the media. We whine about our house's depreciation. We whine about being alone.

Then you stand by a trail out in the desert, alone, with blood pouring down your battered limbs staring down into a valley of rush hours and melodramas. The impermenance of all things flows through and around you, watching your blood fall in the red sand and forming clots in the fine dust of ages gone past. The sand here is red, dyed by hematite, a type of iron, oxidizing in the dry air, and my blood is bright red, hemoglobin, the same type of iron oxidizing and oxidated, dyeing my skin red. The building blocks of aerobic respirating organisms paying homage to the glowing core of the earth from which we all explode and then seep back into without a whimper.

It doesn't hurt. Someday, my blood will be returning to the soil of the Earth, red and beautiful, my life, as a vapor, quickly fading away. The blood of my father and his father's father's father before him, it's all going to flow into the river of time out of my own vascularity, maybe with my own heirs carrying this little piece of terra with them, flowing in their veins. When my progeny make their way to a new planet or a new star, they'll bleed the same iron that colors Colorado red. Adam is under my feet, dusting my shirt and face and tires. My blood is falling into the face of creation. Into the flowing glyph of this short existence of flowing, flashing light into the oblivion of void.

I can think of worse places to bleed.

Godspeed You Black Emporer, Moya