ways and wheels.

someone stole the seat off my old, blue bike.
so i bought a super, faster bike.

Much respect to the staff @ 613 Bike Dump.
Check this place out, gnarly bikes and staff with proper knowledge.
www.bikedump.com

On that note, observe the street art of BLU. Milan, Italy.

To friends family, brothers sisters, mothers fathers.

After reading the passage I'm posting, I thought of our brothers, and sisters, family and friends who have been affected by disasters in Japan and New Zealand in the last few weeks..

I feel Exupery's passage relates to an array of matter, not just disaster.  And it can be read as a passage of hope, and solidarity.  Strength in unity.

I am a native English speaker, and I am using the translated version from a French text.
If you read this and possess other tongue, translate it, read it, and feel the strength of universal words.

Technological advancements in social networking can be a tool to affect change and inspire waves of new days.  Donate, write a letter, lend a hand, unite.
Read, listen, hear. Be inspired.

---------------------------
An excerpt from 'Wind, Sand and Stars.' Written By: Antoine de Saint-Exupery. 1939.
Translated from French by: Lewis Galantiere.

Here I touch the inescapable contradiction I shall never be able to resolve. For man's greatness does not reside merely in the destiny of the species: each individual is an empire.  When a mine caves in and closes over the head of a single miner, the life of the community is suspended.
  His comrades, their women, their children, gather in anguish at the entrance to the mine, while below them the rescue party scratch with their picks at the bowels of the earth.  What are they after? Are they consciously saving one unit of society?  Are they freeing a human being as one might free a horse, after computing the work he is still capable of doing?  Ten other miners may be killed in the attempted rescue; what inept cost accounting! Of course it is not a matter of saving one ant out of the colony of ants!  They are rescuing consciousness, an empire whose significance is incommensurable with anything else.

Inside the narrow skull of the miner pinned beneath the fallen timber, there lives a world.  Parents, friends, a home, the hot soup of evening, songs sung on feast days, loving kindness and anger, perhaps even a social consciousness and a great universal love, inhabit that skull.  By what are we to measure the value of a man?  His ancestor once drew a reindeer on the wall of a cave; and two hundred thousand years later that gesture still radiates.
It stirs us, prolongs itself in us.
Man's gestures are an eternal spring.
Though we die for it, we shall bring up that miner from his shaft.
Solitary he may be; but universal he surely is.

------------------------

I dedicate this short verse to all beings, solitary and universal:
(Composed during curious excursions.)

Brothers
pirates
cats
rats
snakes
and sisters.
We all
harbor hard stories.

-KT

...it's one love.