We have asked ourselves in the past about participating in the love economy, but now that we are here, I am not going to talk about roses, or chocolate, or bikes that love you back. I am going to talk about something that happened a little over three years ago that changed my life and brought me a profound joy. It is a joy that continues to this day. I am, of course, talking about our dog, Greta.

Greta is a lab aussie mix. Which is really to say that she’s a mutt. She enjoys naps on the couch, playtime in the park, and being around me and Nat. She makes noises when she yawns in the morning, and we have been known to have yawn-offs where we yawn at each other, her on the couch, me waiting for my morning coffee to kick in. We have an entire routine when I come home from work that involves racing around the yard, belly rubs, and something that I think is the dog version of tag. She is not so great around people, and will bark at you when you come by the house. But she is completely at home with her people, which is to say Natalie and me.

Greta is a rescue from the Heartland Humane Society in Corvallis, Oregon. Her first couple of months weren’t easy. In fact, we were worried for a while that she wouldn’t make it. But she pulled through. For a while she had better health insurance than we did.

Before we took that trip to Corvallis, Natalie and I talked a lot about whether we could incorporate a dog into our lives. We are really busy. Could we really give her the attention she would need? How would we train her? What stuff would we need to buy, and where exactly did we fall on the whole Cesar Milan thing? Looking back I can say that we didn’t need to know all the answers, that it was easier than I expected, and now we can’t imagine a life without her.

No matter where you live, there are pets that need people. And when you bring them into your life, they change you for the better. If you can give an animal the care it needs, please consider giving yourself the give of love and visit your local Humane Society. It might not always be easy, but it will return all the love that you put into it.

Greta in the snow for the first time. from Sweetpea Bicycles on Vimeo.

I’ve learned rather quickly that pregnancy has its own numerology. You count back to the estimated date of conception, count down to the due date, and count up the times the baby kicks. You count on your life never being quite the same again. My numbers are these: 21 weeks pregnant, 7 weeks into my second trimester, and experiencing everything for the first time.

I’ve let go of a whole series of other numbers that were old and familiar friends. My resting heart rate, my mile pace on a 5 mile run, my racing weight, and how much time passes before l really really need to pee. Again.

Pregnancy is at once a private miracle and the most mundane fact of our existence. The only thing that makes my experience at all remarkable is that I should be surprised to learn, as if for the first time, the truth that I am not my body. My identity is not as neatly housed as I had thought. Much of my adult life I have been healthy and injury free. I consider myself lucky. But it also means that nothing has challenged my working theory that my mind and body are generally in agreement about things. We like broccoli. We can run effortlessly, if not fast, on most days. We don’t really take naps.

None of these things are true anymore.

I want to be perfectly clear. My wonderment and gratitude far outweighs any consternation on most days. I can’t imagine a more splendid use of my body than to make a new person, even if that new person may already have clear ideas about broccoli and naptime. I want to throw a welcome party moment to moment on each passing day for the new little critter inside me.

But there are some unexpected moments that I have come to value more dearly. Cyclocross races every Sunday. Each week I pin my race number to my jersey and I race. I may find my heart rate higher, my pace slower, and my finish placement sliding, but that is no longer relevant in my new numerology. I want to be counted among a field of women. Not first, not top-ten perhaps. Just one among many who are doing with their bodies something remarkable and common, hard and temporary.

Welcome to the world. Baby, that’s as good as it gets.

About once a day, like a faithful geyser, Austin will turn to me and say: “Whoa. I think I just had a great idea.” And for as long as I have known that boy, I am still utterly unable to predict whether the great idea is going mean we make pizza for dinner or start a project that fundamentally changes our life.

A few weeks ago Austin had a fantastic idea that I haven’t been able to shake off. I’m calling it Austin’s Tiny Timeshare. He noted that summer has taken a long time to get rolling and that we don’t have much leeway for vacation this year, but we are itchy to make the very best of it. He proposed that we get together with some friends to construct a tiny house in Bend. Imagine us darting out from under the oppressively verdant canopy of the Willamette Valley to make a run for Bend. We’d strike out on a whim with bikes, dog and trail shoes to our launching pad for adventure, our 200sq ft claim on a life outside our norm.

The idea has fueled my day dreams of an imagined future, but the need for escape that it speaks to is present and real. And so Austin’s Tiny Timeshare bobs along in my mind at once delightfully buoyant and sadly out of reach.

But I think the idea of the Tiny Timeshare holds within it another idea ready to unfurl like a parachute and bring this whole scheme back down to earth where we can use it. And that is the idea of the miniature. Specifically, the miniature as used in a Japanese garden.

Japanese gardens use miniature elements like rocks, gravel, and moss to represent larger landscape features. Rocks become small islands, gravel becomes a rolling sea, and moss becomes forested lowlands. Through an artful cultivation of scale and vantage point, the small garden is transformed into a spacious landscape.

The tiny house, of course, has a similar knack for expansion. Its diminutive stance makes the clearing broader and the sky larger. It’s tiny inside reminds you how much outside the world has to offer. But until it is real, I can work with the principles of the miniature in my present landscape and with the time I have.

For what remains of our summer, I will let the small experiences make the rest of my world feel larger.

• A sub-24 hour bike camping trip in place of the weeklong bike tour.
• An hour in the park with a magazine rather than a day at the beach with a novel.
• A pint of blueberries from the farm stand instead of the day spent picking and jamming.

I’ll be jumping lightly among these moments, like jumping from rock to rock in a garden that is really islands in a great big sea.

My bicycle obsessions tell a different story. The bikes that I own and the bikes that I covet prove me to be quite the opposite of a minimalist. I add features. My “fast bike” has the couplers and takes fenders and a rack. Even my fantasy track bike has two water bottle cages. And disc brakes. And brass fenders. And a chaingaurd. Oh! And the ability to convert it to an internally geared bike if I want. See what I mean?

My latest bike obsession has forced me to come face-to-face with my miminalist/maximalist conflict. I want an long tail. Specifically, I want to transform my Two Bite Curry city bike into the Free Ranger with the Xtracycle’s Free Radical conversion kit. If you ask me why, I will tell say:

• 15 pounds of dog food and a bale of hay
• Bike camping
• Carrying your new Sweetpea to the final fitting
• Putting my mom on the back for a picnic at Laurelhurst Park

My inner minimalist asks me if I haven’t been doing just fine with my current basket and panniers. It reminds me that I already have a trailer. My inner minimalist asks me if more “stuff” is the answer.

But here’s the catch. I don’t suppose it’s a material problem I am looking to solve. I am willing to admit that the physical things I want perhaps speak more directly to the intangible things that I want.
I want to feel that any adventure is possible.

• I want to imagine that I am one good idea away from a bike trip to the coast.
• I want to broadcast generosity of spirit at every frequency. “Let me carry that for you!” “ Can I give you a lift?”
• I want to get pulled over for reckless optimism. With my mom riding shotgun.

I don’t know yet if and when I will be getting the long tail. But I am inclined to believe that some of the best stuff you’d want to carry with you down the road doesn’t actually weigh you down at all.

This bike began as a big idea and a spot in line.

The big idea was that you could build a bike almost entirely in Portland from design to finished product, and that the only thing standing in the way of that was a little help from friends. So a year before last year’s Alice awards, we put a spot in line for a frame and fork, and donated it to the BTA.

Then we reached out to Michael Sylvester of Bicycle Fitting Services for the fit, Chris King for the wheels, BB, and headset, and asked River City to bring it home. This is the finished product. It took a little while to completely come together, but it showed how a simple idea can turn into something beautiful.

I have a favorite garden in Kyoto. It wasn’t one of those totally immaculate and famous gardens. It was part of a larger park up on a hillside. But whether Japanese gardens are formal or not, they are meant to be seen by walking through them, allowing the path shifting your perspective, revealing and obscuring views. Stone steps lead your eyes as much as your feet. Meandering about this particular garden, I came to a point where two paths converged. They met up and led me another ten feet to a dead end. I found myself stopped short at a scraggly lumpy little azalea plant.

I found this both funny and sweet. The language of the garden is subtle, full of commas and parenthesis, but here was an azalea exclamation point. “Look at me! Aren’t I fantastic?”

I’ve got paths on my mind as I plan my garden for spring. We’ve lived here not a year yet, and our yard is already marked by use and habit, and the course of everyday life. Paths have been worn into the lawn, now mud. I see the path from the side gate to the shop, well worn. I see the patio to the chicken coop, well worn. I see the turn around spot that the dog has made on her wild ricochets across the yard and back.

These paths tell a story, and it is a factual account. I can respect that. I may even lay down a stone path to formalize them. But I also find myself with an urge to lay down some shiny mosaic stepping stones on the way to my rhubarb plant, way at the back of the yard. It is growing little by little while I go about my business. Sweet, tart, and sturdy. I should travel that path often and give my rhubarb a few kind words. At some point it will be the path to pie.

The best part about making things by hand is that you get to carefully consider how you want to approach your materials, your tools, and your process. You can add your intelligence and your insight along the way to produce an object that simply couldn’t exist without your hand in the making. Or as Steve Jobs put it you can try “to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing.”

The flip side is that you can also add your inexperience and your miscalculations and end up with a mistake. When the hand and the brain are connected in the making of things, it can be a blessing or a curse.

I picked up the fork that I had just built the day before. It was my first unicrown fork. I cleaned it up and admired it from all angles. It looked good! And then I discovered that it was shorter than I had designed it to be. I soon saw my error, and realized what I need to do differently. But there is no getting around it, the fork I was so proud of turned out to be a dud.

The generous view is that making mistakes is part of the learning process. And it is commonly said that the best craftspeople are the ones who are continually learning. These twin platitudes are a shallow consolation when I need to both learn and produce on a tight timeline. I don’t have a lot of time to be messing around building lovely but too-short forks.

The less generous, brutally pragmatic view is that I could have sourced a fork from a supplier that has nearly identical specifications, from the rake, to the span, to every last braze-on. It would have been less expensive to buy that complete fork than to pay for my materials and paint costs, let alone my time. Let alone twice. But I wanted to build it. I wanted to build it because I had the opportunity to learn something new. I also was convinced I could build a fork that was more beautiful than the one I could buy, despite having never done so.

So, I will go out into the shop early tomorrow morning and buckle down until I have my second ever unicrown fork. What will be visible in the finished product? Refinement or beauty? Maybe, maybe not. But it will be the fork that simply wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t built the first one. That will be good enough.

This is what it looks like when we plan our future.

Important things for you to know:

• S’mittens will be back in limited and colorful numbers.
• We will also have some of Natalie’s block prints, including one brand new (and quite large) addition.

It’s the holidays people.  Let’s do this thing.

One Percent For the Planet | Sweetpea Bicycles from felt soul media on Vimeo.

The folks over at 1% For the Planet are doing short member profiles with some help from the gang at Felt Soul Media (who incidentally did the awesome film Red Gold).  We are stoked that they chose to profile us, as well as give Greta her internet video debut.  They do a great job of capturing why we 1% members, but we also feel pretty lucky to share a little space on the internet with our business hero Yvon Chouinard.

When we joined, there wasn’t even a cycling category.  Today, in addition to the 52 participating Oregon companies, there are also a bunch of great local cycling companies who are also 1% members.  (See: Team Estrogen and Tsunehiro Cycles)