Peddling Towards a Regenerative Lifestyle

        A long time ago, Glow and I, were uninitiated kids peddling into marriage, literally. Mounted on a pawned-$5-Costarrican-banano-bike we rode out of the church and into….well, who’s to say? We certainly had no clue. We were so young then; and that meant full of blood. The old stories speak of it as red-warrior-energy, the kind of vein-juice that moves you, with determination, through the guaranteed insanities of wedding planning and first mortgages only to then leave you short-winded like the boy who got a bike for Christmas and speeding away, vowed to make it all the way down to the beach and back only to, run adrenaline-dry, somewhere half way back up the hill, exhausted and stranded, with thumbs up, not for approval, but rather hoping to hitch a ride. 

We were definitely living in the often blindly romanticized “here and now” where being “present” is chastised by the scope of our awareness. How deep are the roots of a tree with a trunk as thick as a teenage forearm?

As I try to think back on our just-married goals, they sing a survival song to the beat of a few dozen gringos down in Guatemala on a steeply overpriced one night stand Ayahuasca tour. Tapping into the deeper song of the ever expanding Universe beckoning us from outside of time to live out our beautiful and authentic potential for change in order to remember ourselves back into the regenerative beings we were always meant to be was, needless to say, out of ears reach.

Tragically but all too common nowadays, we had no village to be held accountable by and to. We had family, naturally, but family is both foxly and sheeply different than village. The family’s sole purpose is to carry, mold, applaud and then wave good-bye to each of us into marriage. A job well done of sorts, except that for the most part, those of us who are married, know well, that in fact, once the drone of the church bells has dwindled in the distance and our last youthful savings has been spent on the honey moon suite, we are left completely fucked. Two half-adults unaware of their halfness, trying to make things work with no village to be guided by into the depths of what being human means is what we were set up for and precisely the mangrove we have been hacking our way through for the past 8 years, thankfully in the warmth of a village for the latter half of our time together.

Two or some years ago we sold our house, becoming debt-free again, and packed our now family of 4 and set flight for China. Little did I know the Homeric transformations that would unfold for my marriage, family and career domino-ing from this decision. One of these changes can be visualized in the photo, here:

In as much as we may have started off our marriage on a pawned-$5-Costarrican-banano-bike it was by no means the conscientious decision towards regenerative practice rather a force-majeure due to our impoverished youthful upstarts in married life. Once we were rolling in the dough that bike was back at the pawn shop and we were doing our first rounds, of many, of car-shopping. Thankfully, now, our car days are also gone. This time around our investment into being a bike-family stems from the holistic modeling of fellow villagers that as families have chosen to pedal down the path less traveled clearing the brush for us to follow.I can’t but chuckle upon remembering a run I made to the Juan Santamaria Airport to pick up my buddy Ron and his family upon their return to Costa Rica in 2013. There I was, in my pride and joy VW Golf, picking up a family of four that had decided to ship their bikes down to Costa Rica to be a bike-family for their second jab at life south of the border. I was impressed then and envious. I never thought my family would make that leap, let alone this quick. Oh how joyful I am to be able to embrace the regenerative practice of becoming a bike-family even if I have to admit that that reference to the boy who got a bike for Christmas and bit off more than he could chew was actually me, on our first outing, which ended up busting us after 25k, stranded and out of wind calling for a taxi ride home. No doubt this will be a big year of learning and growing of mountainous proportions. One first lesson I’ve learned is that remembering a regenerative lifestyle while married ain’t no joke but it can happen and make married life all the better!

One goddamn lucky husband, 

Gluskabe

October 18^th, 2016