I bought a bike on craigslist and am now completely obsessed with it. I refuse to get on the subway. Every time I get on the bike instead of the subway, I have this little thrill of freedom. No, I will not go underground and stand, deflated, among detritus and rat droppings. Rather, I will don a helmet and take my life in my own hands as I dodge taxis trying to cross 14th street.
I know I'm prone to using this statement, but it really is pretty much the best thing ever.
Tonight I was pedaling home along the Hudson River just as the sun was dipping down over the horizon, and as I rounded the corner before the Boat Basin at 79th, I was overwhelmed. Whatever those flowering trees that are blooming right now, were this riotous shower of pink and white and green, and the sun was hitting the water and shining through the haze in a way that seemed to make everything glow golden. There was this big old barge motoring along toward the George Washington Bridge in the distance, and it seemed for a moment as I creaked along on my bike that the whole world had found some uncommon moment of joy and wonder. Just a moment.
I wanted to take a picture so I could show all of you here. To say, "Look, do you see how gorgeous the world is?" But I didn't want to stop riding, because I didn't want the feeling to end, and most of all, I knew that the beauty I had felt would be strangely absent from any photograph I could take. Moments like these don't like to be captured.
Our lives are made up of so many fleeting moments of joy or misery or grief or comfort, strung along something, a thread, a cord. Whatever it is that holds them, suspended, that finds cohesion and grace in the movement between moments, I call it God.
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