a Triumph of the Spirit: One Writer’s Experience of the Machine, the Mind, the Spirit . . . and the Horizon

“A motorcycle has no imagination. A motorcycle is a chunk of refined iron ore configured to go forward at varying rates of speed. A motorcycle cannot bleed, and it cannot think. Therefore, it cannot have an imagination. But all we have to do is slide onto the saddle of a motorcycle and our own imaginations go berserk. We become different people; we start to think differently. Our bodies are sitting on the machine but our minds are in some ethereal place where all the mundane things of our lives are hidden from view. We see the world in an entirely different way. We can go places beyond the imagination.” Why ride? Lee Maynard, life-long motorcycle rider and author of seven novels, answers the question from his own perspective. In A Triumph of the Spirit, we are taken to the far reaches of a human spirit that searches constantly for the horizon, only to discover that the horizon always is out of reach. And that is when we understand that it is the search, not the finding, that is the center point of our being. It is the ride.