Musings on a bicycle ride

A good little girl went to play with her friends, and I had a very nice morning with a bicycle folded up in the trunk. I rode out to the Ara waterway again. It's nice to ride a bike there. You can pedal along the water and your tire will hum all along the way and you can forget what you are while you use your body to make yourself move. You make yourself move. You connect your legs to the thing and in circles they go and you're not a passenger or a driver; you're a part of the machine, the most integral part. But you're also out there and you're a part of the air and the dust and you can see yourself as this thing in the water's reflection, moving forward. And the thing is that it's only you out there on a late Monday morning and you trust the you-and-it machine because you're walking a long way back home if either one gives out. Or there is an intermittent other who comes at you from ahead slow but zips by in the briefest moment of contact with a tiny nod to another man-and-machine but you don't interfere with the way the things are. Along the way you find some nice places that God made beautiful but that men keep beautiful, so you stop the thing and get off and prop it up and take out your phone and take some pictures of it. Put the pictures somewhere, actually put them somewhere, like a blog, so you can look at them again when you're bored and randomly looking at old things you saved.