How are you? What are you working on, artistically or otherwise? Who or what has shaped who you are? What inspires you? What do you love? Send a letter to luke@retroduck.com and let me know. Here is one from my friend Amber on willing your heart to find a way to rise anew, an excellent Easter Sunday sentiment. Photos found at Dangerous Minds.
It’s springtime, and I’ve been looking out the window, thinking about chaos and physics and the joys of muscle memory. And the unique fizzy bliss of riding a motorcycle in and out of a turn. ::grin::
If you haven’t ridden, a moving motorcycle is affected by gyroscopic forces that are unique to two-wheeled machines–on a bike, you’re both part of the external forces and the self-correcting mechanism.
When you go around a corner, you as a rider apply force via leaning, and gyroscopic forces will Drift Your Bike around said corner until you stop leaning. Those same gyroscopic forces will then correct your bike back upright and into a straight line.
I think in bike class, I heard ‘cornering bike is a collection of competing forces that are nine-tenths crashed’ and the “whoa important!” last-tenth is the balanced gyroscopic forces that you eventually learn without thinking, like breathing.
As you become more proficient, your body becomes a wiser machine, your core and legs and arms coiling in unison with your brain. It purrs somewhere, maybe in your lizard brain(?), and hums its way throughout. The chaos and the order and the science and adrenaline of it all make me swoon just writing about it.
When I started to learn this in my body, not just reading about it–and for fuckle’s sake not sitting behind someone on a bike–I was so excited. I grinned with such uncool obvious goony glee: publicly, goofily, unmistakably joyful in that early mastery. I love that feeling–beginning to viscerally know something challenging that took an investment and a measure of discomfort and bravery.
Like knowing without looking where D and G and C are on your ukulele. (Or anything.) Or gently curling up into bakasana. Or building a meditation practice. Or nailing a joke while telling a story where people pay rapt attention.
I’d leaned into motorcycles when my life was packed with busy empty things, avoiding my grief about a marriage ending. I was so brittle. My bike whisperer brother found a 1980 Yamaha XS 400 for me that became a community project in the center of his shop, more than an hour from my home. His former band mates, a curious neighbor, friends from school, even my Dad showed up odd nights and on weekends to help bleed a brake line, paint the tank, fix the fuel pump. Piece by piece, beer by beer, by mid-summer I had a bike.
Practicing for my riding test, talking physics and music with my brother, learning new fixes from friends–all ways I leaned into growth and joy as I was grieving the end of another part of my life back at home.
Anyway, I felt like visiting with something that feels joyful and expansive that I carry with me—especially while waiting in isolation at home during the pandemic can make things feel small and limited.
In the quiet sheltering month ahead, I wish you the giddy joy of new mastery of something thrilling and difficult. I hope you become a new machine. And I’d love to hear about it.
Amber