Honey and Onions
I expected my cross-country journey to tax my body and hone my senses, but what I did not foresee was how the trek would sharpen my perception of the extremes and the flow that runs, like an electric river, between them. No longer disconnected from the natural world, I saw opposing forces or energies everywhere, especially in how we humans organize and govern ourselves.
This newfound sensitivity was due, no doubt, to my new daily routine. Freed from the rushed, disjointed and compartmentalized nature of sedentary living, I (re)discovered how moving across the land on a self-powered two-wheel contraption can be a mind-opening and mentally liberating venture. On a bike, the barriers erected between us and the natural world dissolve. On my bike, I was not ensconced in air-conditioned comfort staring at a mobile device or LCD monitor but engaging with the organic through my own senses.
My first encounter with this rhythm was directly related to the irregular but stunning terrain of the Olympic Peninsula, which, unsurprisingly, determined my level of enjoyment. I felt inexpressible joy on the downhills but strain and pain on the short, steep climbs.
Olympic Discovery Trail
As the weeks went by and I got deeper into the trek, the rise and fall of the land, the wind’s direction, and even the weather transformed from the exceptional to the routine -- much as the way a new commute or the stairs leading to your new workplace or home eventually becomes second nature – until I was no longer phased by the physical extremities. The mountains and the valleys, the tailwinds and headwinds, the dry, sun-soaked days and the drenching rain layered one on top of another until they seeped into consciousness and became simply the sphere in which I moved through.
I encountered polar opposites repeatedly; sometimes, even instantaneously. For example, on my second day of riding in the Snake River Valley in Idaho I was propelled by a generous tailwind that had the curious effect of making me feel superhumanly strong. “Nice,” I told myself. “If this keeps up I am in for an easy day’s ride and will get to my destination quicker than planned.” It didn’t take long to have my expectations shattered and revealed as both fragile and fleeting. Because, in a flash, the wind direction reversed and, lo and behold, I found myself fighting an invisible and stingy foe. Each mile of progress required rib-busting, soul-draining against-the-wind effort – for the remainder of the day’s ride. Painful is too gentle a word to describe those brutal miles.
But the rhythm of the Universe transcends the physical extremes of terrain and weather I described above. There are larger, universal forces that inform the human experience. We are, after all, electrical beings, each with our own electromagnetic field (albeit a weak one), moving through space on a planet continually bombarded with charged particles in the solar wind. And though our atmosphere protects us, the positive and negative ions in the atmosphere do affect mood and behavior. I’m convinced we are forever moving between the poles – physically, mentally, and emotionally -- in a current of energy streaming through our physical and personal worlds. We continually encounter doubt and clarity, serenity and angst, ecstasy and grief, to name just a few. Over two thousand years ago the Chinese created a symbol -- the taijitu -- for this underlying energy, which was, over time, simplified to represent the two interlocking forces of yin and yang.
We all feel the pull of the extremes of yin and yang and the tension between them. I have struggled with this tension – unconsciously and consciously – my entire life.
Honey and Onions
One of my favorite metaphors to describe the tension between the opposites is “honey and onions.” As a community worker living in a Palestinian town in the Western Galilee in the early 1980s, I discovered that people frequently answered the question, “How are you?” with the expression “yam asal, yam basal” (يوم العسل، يوم البصل -- one day honey; one day onions). This pithy expression epitomizes the human experience – one that was particularly relevant for the farmers and working-class men and women I met regularly. Each day contains the sweet nectar of honey. Each day brings the sharp bite of onions.
If I could condense life as honey and onions into one story on my trek, it would be the events early in the third week when I was having what I call “an onion day.” After crossing the Western Continental Divide the previous day, I had continued my descent into the arid Wind River Valley in western Wyoming. Following a lunch break in a (thankfully) shady highway rest stop, my rear wheel punctured -- for the third time in less than two weeks! Moments earlier my mind had been roaming happily, but as soon as I heard the hiss of escaping air, that wide open mental space I inhabited collapsed.
The sun looked like an angry Aztec god, its bright face impassively staring down at me in the mid-afternoon sky. The shoulder was littered with irregular-sized gravel and chunks of crumbled asphalt. My hands were caked with dirt and streaked with dark grease from my chain. The spare, a tube I had patched, was not inflating; in my hour of need, my less-than-stellar patch job had betrayed me. Sure, I had one more, brand-new tube to spare, but it was my last. As I worked, beads of perspiration slid down my forehead and into my eyes. Stung by my own fluids! Yes, worse things happen at sea. Still, it was like biting into an onion.
Descending into the Wind River Valley in western Wyoming.
And to think that the previous day had been pure honey. I had climbed from the Buffalo River Valley east of the Grand Tetons through the bucolic alpine meadows of the Absaroka Mountains up and over the Towgotee Pass, at 9,658 feet, the highest elevation I would climb during the trek. I had raced down the mountain’s eastern flank and enjoyed a bicyclist’s trifecta: a swift ride on a freshly paved road with a tailwind to boost my speed.
But less than twenty-four hours later, there were no remnants of the sweet taste of honey. In fact, the onions started tearing me up way before my struggles with the flat tire. Like when I foolishly assumed I would continue the elevation drop I started the previous day only to be sorely disappointed when I found myself straining up miles of short but steep rises as US 26 climbed away from the Wind River (another example of how expectations are fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest touch of a negating force).
Like when some guy yelled at me when I pulled into that shady rest stop. A scraggly looking dude behind the wheel of a beat-up van, he took a quick look in my direction, noticed the orange neck buff that I had pulled up to cover my nose and lips and protect them from further solar damage, and as he drove away, screamed, “Hey!! There is no virus, you stupid sonofabitch!!”
And now, just over ten miles later, the flat tire.
After I got my second and last spare tube seated, I threw my toolkit and now useless tubes into my faded red pannier and got ready to push off but discovered that I could not clip into my pedals. What? More onions? A quick look revealed that my cycling cleats were now caked with a gooey, black, tar-encrusted asphalt mix. I must have stepped on the broken road surface equivalent of dog shit. Apparently, it's when we’re in these liminal spaces that detritus – both inner and outer – gums things up, preventing forward movement.
On a bike trek – as in life – there is a tension between polar opposites. Honey and onions. Carl Jung once wrote that without this tension there is no life.
Taoist teachings are fundamentally about the dynamic interplay and balance of opposites. The ability to find this balance, particularly in our highly polarized society, is an ageless challenge. Are we up to it? And what happens when you successfully integrate the opposites? I can’t say, but I do know what happens when you mix honey and onions: the combination of the two makes for a highly effective cough medicine. In this case, integrating opposites relieves irritation. Where there is a way forward there is hope.