Bicycle excursions in the hours of levitating daylight have been prescriptions for pure joy. I take the path along the shore where I weave into walkways with spilling bougainvillea and honeysuckle leading to the farmers market. I stop there for fresh berries and cold coconut water to consume along the way. Sometimes I carry a camera and often my journal, but mostly I am enveloped in the moment. My hair flies feral in the ocean breeze, my skin hot from the sunshine. The scent of Nag Champa from the Venice Beach Boardwalk mingles with the sounds of shouts, laughter and basketballs thumping on the court. I pedal past Santa Monica Pier where the ferris wheel I love is in motion and continue to Malibu where the breeze becomes more prominent, more urgent. This is where I begin to feel the most free. I disembark and sit for awhile. In solitude I am encircled by the ancient stories of voluble waves and I beckon them to tell me all that they know.
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.
- Christopher Morley