Splash of Spirit

When I visit my parents each summer, my sister and I take a daily morning bike ride. We have a twenty mile loop that includes beach side, meadows, and woods, with some edges of towns at the corners. When it has rained the night before, there are puddles on the road and the trail - sometimes covering the whole road surface. My sister generally plows right through them, lifting her feet high off the peddles. I tend to go around them if I can, and if I can’t, I go through gingerly, hoping to avoid the wet, sandy track of splashed water up my back.

My sister rides all year round. Once, she told me, she had ridden right after a heavy rain, and pretty much the whole trail was a big puddle. The sky had cleared, and the puddles were vividly reflective. She said she had almost a feeling of vertigo, seeing the reflection of the trees and sky deep below her. She said, maybe we’ll get a ride like that while you’re here.

A few days later, we had a ride that had some puddles. I approached them in my usual way. Another feature of our rides is conversation - we call ourselves the biking philosophers, solving the world’s problems each morning at six, except on Fridays, when we take out the trash first. So the conversation was going along on that day - I was trying to explain some metaphysical point to her, and getting the feeling that I shouldn’t have tried. My words were just creating a sense of separation, and I didn’t feel I had any way of expressing it that could pull it together. Then we came to a puddle.

It was a bright puddle, full of sunshine and yellow-green from sun-drenched trees, with blue and white from the sky. It was on Jennifer’s side of the trail, and she rode right through it with great delight. She exclaimed at how the vivid picture was splashed into an abstraction of colors as her tires plowed through.

I was ready to just let that be the end of my efforts to explain my point. But Jennifer urged me to continue, so I said,

When you just rode through that puddle, it was this marvelous connection with another world - with the depth of the sky beneath you and the play of the colors. And when you went through it you felt a thrill, because of the sensation and your connection to it. That was an experience of being alive. Now I went through a puddle a little while back, and I didn’t see the reflection at all, because I was thinking of the sand that would go up my back, and trying not to get my feet too wet. Whereas, for you, the puddle was a great experience. But you couldn’t really prescribe your experience in terms of riding through mud puddles - “for your well-being, ride through at least five mud puddles a day.” It somehow wouldn’t get a handle on what you were trying to recommend. But you did have an alive experience riding through the mud puddle. It just can’t be prescribed in material terms. That’s what I mean by saying life is entirely spiritual. You can’t get a handle on what’s important, substantial, valuable, by pursuing material experience. Because it can’t capture the quality that makes you love it.

That made sense to Jennifer. The actual presence of the alive moment worked in a way that none of my philosophical words could do. The splash of Spirit came and united us in understanding - bright yellows and greens and blues exploded into clarity - the abstract colors forming a concrete connection.