WORLDFIRE - Chapter 13, Part II

Abandonment to Providence

With Mount Rumpke receding in my rearview mirror, I dipped south 18 miles into the heart of Cincinnati. Nearing downtown, I was rolling past the St. Joseph Catholic School when some elementary schoolkids on the sidewalk excitedly yelled out to me. So I pulled over to show them the trike. Coming up behind them was one of their teachers who remarked how great it would be if I could talk to the kids at their after-school child care program about what I was doing. Moments later, I was standing in the principal’s office, where I was given permission to do just that. So we assembled on the outdoor basketball court where I did an impromptu rocket trike show-and-tell. Just like the schoolkids I spoke to in Kansas, and the Head Start kids I met in Indiana, interacting with these inquisitive inner-city kids was the highlight of my day. It would not dawn on me until later, but my Mom used to look after “latchkey kids” between when they got out of school and when their parents got home from work. I finally understood why she found that volunteer work so enriching.

From the school, I rolled up to Cincinnati’s Fountain Square, where I did a television interview with a local NBC affiliate, then an ABC affiliate, which ran this clip on the evening news: “A self-described regular guy who grew up in Sharonville is doing something many of us wouldn’t think of doing. Tom Weis is riding a trike shaped like a rocket from Colorado to Washington, DC to get people talking about one of his passions. He stopped downtown at Fountain Square Tuesday. Weis wants to see America have a 100 percent renewable energy electricity grid by 2020 and he says it’s possible.” That was pretty cool, given that I used to watch that same news program growing up.

After the interviews, a father-son duo walked up to ask me about the trike. After hearing about my mission, the son, Zach Weprin, invited me to crash at his pad down the road. It turns out Zach, his brother, and a friend were co-owners of a casual sushi restaurant, where they treated me to dinner. There is just something inspiring about seeing childhood friends jointly pursue a dream.

After a good night’s sleep on an air mattress on their living room floor, I was treated to breakfast the following morning, then took leave of my young entrepreneur friends and rolled down the hill to the Purple People Bridge, spanning the Ohio River between Cincinnati, Ohio and Newport, Kentucky. Once used by cars, the steel bridge is now dedicated solely to pedestrians and bicycles. It was a sunny morning and I encountered lots of pedestrians out for their morning walks. Minutes after crossing into Kentucky, I had yet another spontaneous encounter with a gentleman named Mike Asad in a strip mall parking lot. Here is what Mike had to say about coal, the greed of the fossil fuel industry, and the lack of political leadership in our country: “We have to go solar, complete solar, or wind, in order for us to replace the use of the energy that we get out of this Earth… I believe coal should stay where it’s at right now, and it’s not a solution for us… It should stay in the ground… I believe it’s all about greed right now. There’s oil in the ground, they want to get it out before this [renewable] technology takes over. So whoever is rich and [a] billionaire, they want to be triple that... I don’t see Washington moving or doing anything about it, or the whole world actually, or any president doing anything about it.” When I asked Mike if he supported the 100% renewable electricity goal, he said: “Absolutely, in ten years… I believe we can do that. We have the technology, we have the brains, we have the money to do that, the resources to do that, as long as we don’t spend it on something else that’s useless.” Mike’s analysis nails it.

Not long after, as if on cue, a coal barge transporting giant piles of little black rocks to be burned at a coal plant chugged past me down the Ohio River. In an age when we can tap the rays of the sun and the breezes of the wind for our electricity, it is time to move beyond the inefficient and polluting practice of burning coal to produce our electricity. The day cannot come soon enough when solar panels and wind turbines made in the USA replace the coal piles on those barges.

Shortly after the coal barge passed, something different caught my eye: a convent perched atop a hill. For some reason, I felt powerfully drawn to it, so I did a U-turn and pedaled up the long gravel driveway to make an unannounced visit to the nuns. Not knowing what to expect, I was warmly received by two nuns who invited me inside to meet the other Sisters of the Congregation of Divine Providence. I don’t know if it’s proper to write about nuns this way, but the sisters were delightfully huggable. They were excited to tell me about a new geothermal system they had installed at their retirement home to supply all of their heating and cooling needs, along with other sustainability initiatives like recycling and growing much of their own produce. They told me the reason they went geothermal was “to save our Earth.” When I pulled out my smartphone and asked if anyone had anything they would like to share with the president, one of the sisters cut loose, saying the White House and cities like Cincinnati need to turn out their lights at night like the rest of us do, and what an obvious and easy way that is to conserve energy. She’s right, of course. Doing this might also help us see the stars at night, now sadly an alien concept to many city dwellers. Then the sisters led me into the convent’s dining room for a home-cooked meal of fried chicken, before lovingly loading me down with more food than I could comfortably carry.

Before departing, Sister Mary Luke Murphy graciously gifted me with a prayer, after explaining the four fundamental virtues these women of God live by: Simplicity, Poverty, Charity, and Abandonment to Providence. I knew a little about the first three, but I had not heard of the fourth. As described by the Congregation, Abandonment to Providence disposes one “to live in this world like pilgrims having no fixed abode, in total trusting dependence on Providence for all we need.” Here is how Sister Murphy explained it to me: “You had asked about our four fundamental virtues… and we try to practice those. Abandonment to providence, certainly Tom, you are practicing that right now by giving up everything and going to Washington to talk to the president and we wish you success with that. I hope… you are able to talk with him about the environment, about the idea of taking care of our Earth. I know he’s very interested in that. We wish him well, we wish you well, and we hope that everything works out for you. You are in our prayers. We’ll pray for you every day, every step of the way.”

Until that moment, I had never thought about my journey in such terms. I thought my mission was just about renewing America with renewable energy, but I had given up my home, my career, my income, the closeness of loved ones, and the security that comes with all of that to live like a pilgrim with total faith that the Universe would provide. Every major faith has some version of this virtue. Yet I knew my abandonment would eventually end and theirs would not. The difference was not lost on me, and the joyous resolve of those nuns filled me with awe.

I am a spiritual, but not a religious, person. I just don’t believe any single faith has a corner on the whole truth. Alternatively, I think there is truth to be found in all the world’s great faith traditions. While religions are too often hijacked for less than divine purposes, I believe each of the major faiths has answers to why we are here, that all have wisdom to impart. At the heart of it all is love. Love others, and love yourself. Thanks to our founders having the wisdom to build a wall between church and state, in America, you have the freedom to decide for yourself what to believe. Indigenous spirituality and the Buddhist worldview speak most deeply to me, but my spirituality is uniquely mine. I embrace animism, which sees all of the Earth as alive and animated by spiritual essence. I worship in the church of nature. The forest is my cathedral.

I believe, as many Native Americans do, that all beings are imbued with Spirit–the “two-leggeds,” the “four-leggeds,” the “winged ones,” the ones that swim, the ones that crawl, the silent standing nations, the elements–and that all are connected, all are sacred. It is not just human beings who are sacred. I believe that everything around us is animated by the same permeating life force. Everything around us is alive. Here is what else I believe (if not always practice): what we do to the least of us we do to ourselves. Think about the consequences of being energetically connected with every living entity. Then think about how today’s predatory capitalist system benefits from denying this connection. The myth of separation is perpetrated to exploit people and the planet. It allows us to avoid taking responsibility for our actions. Knowing we are in fact connected makes us accountable to ourselves, to each other, and to Gaia.

I believe our souls come into this world with a direct line to the divine as our birthright and that when we shed our mortal coils at the end of our life we return to the realm of universal consciousness, which I perceive as overwhelming love and compassion. I believe a divine spark burns within each of us, which is where our answers ultimately lie. That inside each of us is an innate holiness, a soul that houses a deep well of inner knowing and wisdom. Our consumer culture wants us to forget this holiness exists–by cynically advertising inadequacy to feed the futile pursuit of filling that fictional lack with seductive material goods–but remembering is how we evolve individually and as a human family. In the end, I believe there are as many unique paths to the divine as there are unique individuals to walk them.

But I don’t think I have ever heard the divine be described in a more beautifully personal way than by my late friend Richard Prosapio, who wrote in his courageous memoir, Becoming Coyote: "God's humor is present in my own joy, God's compassion in my own willingness to give, God's forgiveness in my own letting go of resentments. My recognition of my shortcomings in these areas is the very assurance that I, and thus God moving through me, seek always to set things right. As a human, experiencing limitation, I will often fall short of perfection in all of this, but God does not take revenge for this failing. I am simply reminded by God within me, through the process of self-honesty, that more and better is possible. And so I continue to uncover God, and to seek a closer and closer alignment to what I know in my heart to be right and true." Said another way, the divine spark that lights up our hearts offers its own path toward enlightenment. When you view life as a personal spiritual quest like this, every day can be an adventure.

Still glowing from my visit to the convent, I sent blessings to the sisters and continued upriver on Highway 8, a ribbon of road that looked good on a map, but was bad on the ground. Peppered with potholes, and with no shoulder, it made for hazardous pedaling with cars whizzing by way too close for comfort. Further impeding my progress was another bout of slipping gears. After advancing only 32 miles, I decided to call it a day at a Kentucky truck stop after getting permission to camp in the back near the idling diesel trucks. To my surprise, the truck stop served Cincinnati chili, so I dined inside and worked on my laptop until closing time at 11:00.

When things didn’t go according to plan, which happened often, I did my best to just roll with it by trusting that there were larger forces at work. I would soon find myself in need of such trust. Setting off on my new route the next morning, on a hilly state highway that at least had a shoulder to ride on, things got even more challenging. The slipping gears made it next to impossible to gain any traction climbing the long steep hills, and after a couple of miles of struggling, and sensing the chain was about to snap again, I decided not to fight it and to use my roadside bike assistance to call for yet another tow, this time to a bike shop back in Newport. Not wanting to wait on the side of the highway, I asked the driver to meet me at the truck stop where I had started the day, and gingerly started pedaling my way back.

Back at the bike shop in Newport, one look at the mechanic’s face told me things were not well. He had diagnosed a host of lingering issues, including a failing derailleur, a badly stretched chain, and a deteriorating shifter cable. After a few hours of labor, he (of course) had to take the trike for a test spin. I enjoyed watching the sleek yellow craft zipping down the road. The huge smile on his face when he stepped out showed me he had enjoyed it even more. The good news is the trike was once again roadworthy. The bad news: the repairs had set me back another pretty penny. Worse yet, I had advanced a measly two miles, and retreated 30, for a net loss of 28 miles on the day.

With the setbacks of the last couple of days, I realized I was not going to make it to, let alone through, West Virginia by mid-November when the weather in the Mountain State usually starts turning for the worse. It was already November 11, and I did not want to risk the hazard of having to share twisting mountain roads with semi-trucks in an Appalachian snowstorm. Something else that had made itself painfully clear to me by now was just how ill-suited the trike was for steep terrain. I needed an easier passage through the Appalachians. Sadly, this meant having to abandon my plans of profiling the lethal legacy of mountaintop removal mining in Kentucky and West Virginia, a barbaric practice employed by the coal industry I still can’t believe no presidential administration has lifted a finger to stop.

Mountaintop removal mining is a radical form of mining that blows the tops off of mountains to access the coal underneath. In addition to destroying mountains, mountaintop removal (MTR) mining destroys human health. Most people have heard of Black Lung Disease caused by inhaling coal dust. Fewer know about the health impacts of MTR mining. I learned from the group Appalachian Voices that “peer-reviewed studies by researchers from more than a dozen universities have concluded that mountaintop removal coal mining contributes to significantly higher rates of birth defects, cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases among individuals living in the region where it occurs.”

In a stark irony, the group also shared: “According to NREL [National Renewable Energy Laboratory], once an area has been flattened by MTR, its wind potential is reduced to the extent that it is no longer economically viable to develop for wind turbine use.” Mountaintop removal mining is not only destroying mountains and poisoning Appalachian communities. It is literally flattening our future. This is a national scandal so disgraceful it prompted Kentucky farmer and philosopher, Wendell Berry, then in his late 70s, to join a 4-day sit-in at the governor’s office to protest the practice. Their sit-in didn’t end mountaintop removal mining in Kentucky, but it was something he felt had to be done. As Berry once told Bill Moyers: “We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what's the right thing to do? What does this Earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?” The best time for us to have ended this barbaric practice was decades ago. The next best time to end it is today.

Leaving the bike shop, it was too late in the day to ride much further, so I scored one last Cincinnati chili fix at a nearby chili parlor, where I had some inspired conversation about the promise of a green industrial revolution with a couple of Harley riders sitting at the counter. The question I had asked myself back in Wray, Colorado–how many Harley riders would like to see America go green–just kept answering itself. After dinner, I found a nearby motel and got settled in for the night. As darkness descended, I found myself drifting off to sleep to the soothing sound of horse-drawn carriages clumping up and down the road outside my open window.

NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.