Wind Wheel Samadhi

A man with a good bicycle don't need no Jesus!

I cycle everywhere. My bicycle is not so much a artificial prosthesis as it is an actual living limb. It is, like a leg, of immense value to me, not just in terms of moving, but in terms of thinking too.

In some ways the bicycle is the great metaphor for the cosmos; in other ways, it is a more subtle metaphor for a gradual awakening. One has to enact a path when one cycles, a path that has, more often than not, not been laid out before you. On top of that, one has to source one's own auto-mobility, and, ineluctably, re-connect to the magic of moving (for its own sake). In returning to this 'magic', one slowly returns to a state of freshness, to a state of awakeness.

Flowing, arc-ing and sweeping round bends, the lightness of moving, of gliding through space, almost flying through air, is the closest approximation I know of to the soaring flight of the seagull or to the spontaneity of a child running. It is the epitome of play. The gravitational pull of the earth is at no point more elegant than when one is conveyed downhill on a bicycle. In moving across the land on a cushion of air, and 'living at one inch above the ground', one attains a sense of freedom and of openness to all things that is self-evident within this selfless state of play. With no screen or speed to shield us, the cyclist necessarily becomes more elemental, more essential, more original.

There is also the small matter of the wind. On a bicycle, even on a windless day, there is wind. The rush of air renders the bicycle an air-craft, and cycling some kind of aero-planing. It’s no accident that the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics long before developing the first airplane. Cycling, if the truth be told, is not just a metaphoric awakening, it is Nirvana itself. It’s not just the wind (vana is related to wind in Hindu), it is the struggle and reward of all that ‘uphilling’, and the reciprocity. The cyclist attains rest in exertion, reaches movement in tranquillity, becomes tuned in by tuning out.

Wind wheel samadhi...