Dust Devil

I took advantage of the warm dry Memorial Day weekend to ride the bicycle.  Sunday was a long ride down to the river; returning home meant a punishing but rewarding altitude climb.  Monday was a ride with no particular destination or route - just a meandering that was almost as much mental as it was physical.
Monday's ride took me through rural areas in Indiana, down many little-used roads.  The air was less humid than the previous few days, with the sun rapidly heating up the morning.  While headed north on a narrow farm road, I saw something I hadn't seen in quite some time.  A dust devil rolled from west to east.  After crossing the road in front of me, it picked up some of last year's corn husks and carried them over a recently-planted field before disappearing in a vibrantly green wheat field.  I stopped riding, taking time to watch the dust devil.  I wondered for a few seconds how a dust devil forms, but put the thought out of my mind and just lived the sight of it in the undisturbed morning.

Vacation is months away, but planning can allow the vacation to begin long before it actually does.  Hopeful stops can be estimated and potential routes planned.  All this early planning can then be scrapped, with new ideas.  Planning helps build anticipation and creates stamina for the painful monotony of the weekly routine before vacation actually happens.  Mentally, this means vacation is already starting.
The vacation will be a road trip to the Northwest; I was last through the area in 2012, so it hasn't been that long, but I love the big empty and how it slowly builds to the mountains and falls away to the coast.
I reread Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig as just about any route I look at will spend some time in the same areas that the author talks about in that book.  This makes my third reading of it; there are very few books that I've read more than once - let alone three times.  Each time, I pull new things out of the book, and remember previous highlights that I've failed to do anything with.  On my first reading, I liked the parts about the journey, but the philosophical parts could be hard to wade through.  Since I'm now more familiar with the storyline, I find myself more interested in the philosophy and slightly frightened that the author's mental train and non sequiturs can at times be so similar to my own.  The metaphysics can still be a painful slog in some places.  I'm not sure if I have my own Phaedrus, but we all have ghosts.

"The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain."

Among the things I look forward to when traveling are those times when I realize I'm so completely in the moment, unconscious of time, and existing in reality; as well as being completely separated, both mentally and physically, from the normal issues of work or the daily mayhem.  Time seems to stand still and pass quickly simultaneously.  I'm not sure what people who meditate are going for, but I bet it is something like that.  I'm also not sure meditating in the scripted sense will work for everyone, but riding for miles on a motorcycle, sitting in a hunting stand or riding a bike can supply some form of Zen - if accompanied by the right mental state.

"The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there."

Before I saw the dust devil, I was thinking about the upcoming vacation.  Between that and the extra day off of work, I guess I was in the right mental place.  However briefly, life made a little more sense watching that dust devil wander by on Memorial Day.

A few days later, I looked up online how dust devils are formed.  I wish I hadn't done that - Google has made it so we can almost always get too much information quickly, and then discard it like last year's corn husks.  I'm not sure information naturally creates comprehension.  And just watching the dust devil should have remained sufficient.