A ride on our bikes, at it’s best, we hope, gets to freeze time a bit, and offers a kind of meditation on self-reliant passage through an environment. Where SimWorks USA calls home here in the Pacific Northwest, we’re offered no shortage of memorable environments in which to find ourselves- and to pilot our bikes amongst the awe inspiring natural landscapes that we’ve burnished in to our minds. While occupying time and space in the city of Portland, OR offers it’s own variety of wondrous urban escapades, it’s in the surrounding forests, high deserts and coastal environs where we’re humbled by towering ancient flora and the vast range and maw of a verdant fortress. It’s in these environments that we cast some of our fondest memories; given the option, from the seat of our bikes.

The Japanese have an expression of shinrin-yoku – which translates literally to “forest bathing”. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to most of us that the act of immersing ourselves in the forest can provide innumerable, and often immediate benefits to our overall health. These benefits aren’t limited to dips in blood pressure, cortisol levels, pulse and respiratory rate- a myriad of calming effects. For those of us who primarily occupy urban environments, these benefits can be profoundly soothing, and a reliable means to reset our equilibriums. So that bath I’ll take- when available, and ponder my place as animated dust, hurling through endless space.

Nature flourishes through the rhythm of cycles, each one a testament to the intricate balance of life. These cycles, like the ceaseless ebb and flow of tides, weave a tapestry of interconnectedness that sustains the world. Water journeys from the sky to the earth and back again, nourishing the land and all its inhabitants. This particular cycle is ever on display here in the Pacific Northwest. We anxiously await the dance of the seasons, with their predictable yet wondrous transitions. Life itself follows cycles of birth, development, decay, and demise, mirroring the abiding patterns found in the broader universe. Through these cycles, if we pay attention, nature teaches us about resilience, adaptation, and the allure of perpetual change; along the way inviting us to embrace the harmony and interdependence that underpin all living things.

It’s in the spaces between our labored and rhythmic breath while riding that we may consider these cycles. We may watch our breath turn to vapor and return to the atmosphere to be absorbed by the trees around us. Perhaps we seek refuge under the canopy of a densely spaced conifer grove to stay dry while their needles absorb the soak of a passing rain cell. What perspiration our clothing endures, perhaps we dry on the heat of a boulder next to a creek, swollen with cold spring runoff, while we soak our tired hands and feet. It’s these instinctive acts that allow us to channel our own place within the tapestry of nature, and exist if even for a moment, or an hour, or a day as something more than a bystander to the wonders of the natural world.

Bicycles, for us, are the conduit for that connection to the natural world. They transport us efficiently to those places where we can ground ourselves again, and remember what it felt like to be youthful and in awe of the wonder of it all. They tap in to that primal instinct of ours to seek and roam, and to tax our hearts and the full capacity of our lungs and to trust our eyes and ears and to feel the soil beneath us approach and then pass out the tread of our rear tires- to return to the earth again.