It's not the tide of a gentle lullaby

or the roll of a perfect storm.

It's the cacophony of banging pots or questions of foxes

that wakes us up every morn'.

This is a list of things you can do in the great state of Utah! we may or may not have done the things listed.

breathe.

walk into the White Pine County Library tucked away in a park on which I spent seconds and childhoods playing. The poster hangs searing bright in the Nevada sun and reads “Spokes America Workshops”. An arrow points towards the room on the left towards the “Self Compassion and Creative Writing” workshop. I enter, timidly. My eyes shoot down to someone sitting criss-cross apple sauce on an alphabet rug used just an hour before for story time. Sticky notes litter the floor with a stack of white lined paper glued to the ground. 

We first 'met' Zdenko at the top of Carson Pass in the Sierra Nevadas, noting his peculiar recumbent bike, but we didn't stop to talk. The next day, we ran into him and offered to refill his water bottles in exchange for some great conversation about his trip. We discovered that we were headed down the same route and joked that we might run into each other again. Little did we know, we couldn't have been more right.

It’s a strange transition to go from Stanford where you live in weeks, to Highway 50.  On “the Loneliest Road in America,” you live in seconds.  In my head is an internal dialogue, “If I can just make it through these next ten seconds… If I can just push through this next quarter mile”.    When you’re the only person on the road for miles, you notice the stillness of the world, and time seems to exponentially slow down.  It’s a drastically different experience from being on a university quarter system.  By week 5, most people have completed their second midterm, and three months fly by before you’ve absorbed anything that’s happened.

Hello again, my friends!

            As I write this blog post, I am sitting in the van driver’s seat (don’t worry parents; the van is parked! Don’t Write and Drive!) with the door open, the vehicle safely tucked away in a turnoff at a place called Cold Springs, Nevada. It is 8 o’clock in the morning, and while the sun has been peeking out behind the sand mountains since at least 5:30 am this morning, the heat is just starting to come out of hiding. Out on Highway 50, AKA The Loneliest Road in America, the sun is our constant companion, and come this afternoon, that fact is sure to be remembered. As I sit here typing my little heart out, I’m playing my summer country playlist from my phone speakers (10/10 would recommend), and every now and then, a car, or a truck, or an 18-wheeler will pass me by here at Cold Springs, which consists of a small shop, café, motel, and RV park, all within what looks to be a 600-ft. radius. But, my friends, I have a confession - the real reason I am writing you today is not to tell you about today; it is to tell you about Day 10, which was yesterday (Oops. Better late than never, am I right?!).

"The thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions.” -Persig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

A year ago a picked up the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Persig. Wrapped up in the inspiration of Persig’s words, I decided to rent a motorcycle and travel through parts of Uganda. Among many other things, I quickly learned that I did not know how to fix a motorcycle and spent a number of hours with mechanics on the sides of the earthy red roads.

I woke up to the familiar gentle whispers of Spokes' OTP, Brad and Brian. There was no loud banging or abrupt wakeup, so I was slightly confused as to what as going on; this wasn't how morning wakeup was supposed to work. When I finally decide to open my eyes to the abrasive morning sun, I am instead greeted by our tent ceiling lying right on top of our sleeping bodies. "Oh good," I thought, "at least it makes tent clean-up easier."