Inspire(d) Summer 2022 cover artist, Lauren Bonney, created this coloring page for you to make your own! Click the image below to download a pdf and print it at home, then find your medium (crayons, markers, colored pencils, whatever works for you, and color as you see fit. We hope you find an intentional moment of calm coloring this summer!
In the fall of 2021, Linda Tacke went on a bike ride. The Lanesboro, Minnesota, resident pedaled her 16-year-old Bacchetta titanium recumbent from San Diego, California to St. Augustine, Florida. Numbers help tell the story. Days: 58. Miles: 3,100. Miles per day average: 63. Elevation Climb: 0 to 8,000 feet. Temperatures: 37 to 104. Pounds lost: 4. Flat tires: 7. Boogie Board: 1 (waiting for her on a Florida beach).
Wait, one more. Linda took this adventure two months shy of her 70th birthday. Lots of stories in those numbers. Lots to learn, too.
Twenty-plus years ago Linda was working at Park Avenue Methodist Church in Minneapolis. A weeklong senior high bike trip was going to be being cancelled if they couldn’t find one more adult counselor. Linda volunteered. “I did it and fell in love with biking,” she remembers.
When Linda and her husband, David, bought a home in Lanesboro in 2008, she became a RAGBRAI regular (13 times so far) and even started considering a cross-country ride. “David knew I was dreaming about doing that,” she says. “He made me promise I wouldn’t do it alone.”
Linda kept her dream, and her promise, after David passed away in August 2017. “I signed up with Adventure Cycling for their Southern Tier Route and traveled to San Diego to join a group of 11 bikers and two guides. We were from all over: Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington. I was the only Midwesterner. Other than our guides, I was also the only woman. Ages ranged from late 30s to early 70s. They were all really decent human beings, serious bikers, who shared a love for biking.”
Their journey began on September 25 with the traditional bike-tire dip in the Pacific Ocean and took them on a carefully planned route through California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. Each day presented unique road conditions, some unpredictable weather, and a fixed daily routine (pedaling each morning by 8 am, meet back by 4:30 pm). Sleeping accommodations were a mixed bag, from RV parks to Quality Inns to KOAs to a police station to church lawns to pitching tents in the gravel parking lot of the Apache Gold Casino in San Carlos, Arizona. “You learn to be flexible,” Linda says.
She wanted to see America by bike and she got her wish. “In California and Arizona we biked through state and national parks with fabulous scenery. Pedaling through beautiful date and pecan groves is a special memory. Lots of hours under big skies, too. We hit 75-mile stretches in Texas that didn’t have a single intersection.”
Two small towns became highlights. “Marfa, Texas has a growing reputation as a unique arts center,” Linda says. “We arrived there on one of our ‘rest days’ and had a great time exploring.” Merryville, Louisiana, a community of about a thousand people, provides wonderful hospitality to long-distance bikers. “For Sunday dinner they fed us seafood gumbo, crayfish pie, fried alligator, and scratch chocolate cake. Phenomenal!”
Spectacular scenery, plenty of food, and miles of roadway made for quite a trip. Challenges, too. “On our first night as I rode into camp, the seat fell off my bike,” Linda says. “Bad timing. I was hot, sweaty, and scheduled to cook dinner for 13 people. I texted pictures of the broken bike to my engineer-brother, John, and he prescribed epoxy and c-clamps. It worked.” Days later, with the chipseal roads of Texas tearing up her tires, an emergency side-trip to an Austin, Texas, bike shop led to modifications on her bike-frame that allowed for bigger, more durable tires. That worked, too.
Facing all the challenges, Linda hung in there. “I never seriously considered quitting,” she says. “Physically I was fine; on not one day did any part of my body hurt. I missed a turn in Los Cruces, New Mexico, and ended up a bit lost. Twice during the trip I had to take a ditch when it looked like a car behind me wasn’t moving over. But I just kept pedaling, moving ahead mile by mile. The guys called me ‘the girl with grit,’ and I took that as a compliment.”
Why did she take a trip like this? “I enjoy challenges,” Linda says. “Taking this on made me feel very alive.” All those miles on a bike also gave her an unexpected gift: time alone. “Adventure Cycling has a policy of no media. My original idea to listen to audio books wasn’t going to happen.” She never felt lonely, though. “A number of loved ones have left this world too soon. David, of course. My friend and biking companion, Shannon, died the previous March. My youngest sister passed in 2014. While I was on the trip another friend died from cancer. Those faces were always with me.”
Without a doubt, the trip changed Linda. “I had time to consider priorities,” she says. “It made me think about simplifying my life and the importance of gratitude. I’m enormously grateful that I could do this trip and for all the people who helped me along the way.”
The last day – November 20, 2021 – was maybe the most memorable. “We only rode 40 miles so we could coordinate our arrival with family and friends coming to St. Augustine to welcome us.”
What a welcome it was. After their triumphant Atlantic Ocean bike-tire dip, it was time for warm hugs, a few sips of champagne, and photos all around. Her friend, Kim, who’d driven from Sarasota to welcome Linda back, had a surprise waiting. “She pulled two boogie boards out of her car trunk,” Linda says with a hearty laugh. “We both jumped into the ocean – me still in my biking clothes – and for the next hour and a half we swam, laughed, and splashed in the waves.
“I felt great that I had met this challenge at this point in my life. It made me realize how good it is for me – for all us – to venture out of our comfort zones. We really can do more than we think we can. And we can have a great time doing it. Playing in the ocean that day made me feel like a 7-year-old!”
A 7-year-old. That may be her best number of all.
Steve Harris is a freelance writer and the author of Lanesboro, Minnesota, whose happiest trail is the 42-mile Root River State Trail from Fountain to Houston.
When you find yourself biking on the shoulder of a highway, special precautions are needed, says Linda Tacke. “We ended up riding in those conditions more than a few times on our trans-America trip,” she recalls. “To stay safe you need to stay extra careful.”
What practical tips does she recommend?
• Always wear a helmet. Always.
• Make sure your bike has a mirror. You need to see what’s going on behind you as much as what’s going on in front of you.
• Make sure you’re visible! Cars need to see you. We rode with “slow-moving vehicle” triangles on our backs. Our bikes also had flashing lights. Bright clothing helps, too.
• Ride single file – always.
• No ear buds. Stay alert to traffic and to your surroundings. Hearing is an important part of that.
• If cars slow down and bunch up behind you, pull off the road and let them pass. Safe for you, safe for them.
• When at all possible, avoid highway-shoulder biking. Utilize good secondary roads and roads with less traffic, or at the least, roads with good wide shoulders.
• If you need to stop while biking on a highway shoulder, make sure you quickly move at least 10 feet off the roadway.
Welcome to the heart of summer. The prairies are decorated with wildflowers and the woodlands are full of life. Long nights and sunny days leave us feeling filled to the brim with energy. Many of us are busy with projects, plans, and the prospect of bright days ahead.
Yet, at the end of this glorious season, how many times have we found ourselves thinking, “Where did the summer go?”
The following pages are an invitation to enter summer with intention; to slow down, pause, and appreciate all this moment has to offer.
Intentions may help us to develop greater meaning in our lives; they allow us to approach our daily tasks with a positive mindset.
Many people confuse intentions and goals. Others may consider them synonymous. There is a subtle – yet distinct – difference between the two. Goals are concrete, measurable, and specific. A goal requires tasks to be accomplished in order to meet a specific outcome. For example, “I will run a 5K by the end of summer.”
Intentions may help us accomplish a goal, but they are less about the end point and more about the process. An intention sets the tone for our way of being. An intention is a gentle reminder about who we aspire to become, and how we choose to live. In line with our earlier goal, an intention might sound like, “I intend to lead a healthy life that makes me feel strong and energized.” This intention still allows us to meet our end goal, but it changes our relationship with the goal.
Living with intention is a daily choice. It determines the way we approach each day, each task, and each moment.
If our intention is to live a healthy life that makes us feel strong and energized, we will make choices to support those goals. We will choose foods that fuel our day. We will engage in activities that build our strength and endurance. At the end of each day, we will go to bed with a sense of accomplishment. In this moment, we may have not yet met our goal, but we can still feel healthy, strong, and energized.
Values are often the driving force behind our intentions. They are the personal motivators related to what we desire and need, and they create a sense of purpose and meaning in our lives. For example, someone may choose to set intentions related to wellness because they value health and happiness. Alternatively, another individual may value love and family and wish to be healthy in order to spend as much quality time with their loved ones as possible. We may be led to discover our values by asking the question, “What does my ideal life look and feel like?”
When we set intentions in accordance with our values, we exponentially increase our sense of happiness and fulfillment in life. This is why it is so important that our intentions feel meaningful to us. When our intentions are connected to something bigger than ourselves, we rise to the occasion. We may not have reached our end goal yet, but we feel like we are already there because we are living with intention. This motivates us to make choices that get us one step closer to becoming the person we intend to be.
Many of us are driven by our thoughts. Society does not teach us that we are separate from our thoughts. Instead, we believe that if we have a thought it must be true; it must be who we are, what we feel, and how we operate. We interrupt this process by practicing mindfulness.
Mindfulness allows us to observe our thoughts without acting on them or assigning meaning to them. We can begin to view thoughts as the weather of our minds. Sometimes the weather is dark and scary. Other times, the weather is bright and hopeful. Just as we accept that the weather will change, we must come to accept that our thoughts will change as well.
If we have a day where we do not live in alignment with our intentions, we may experience storm clouds. Our thoughts may tell us we are lazy, or we will never accomplish our goals. If we choose to believe these thoughts are true, we will fall back into problematic behaviors.
Yet, when we remain mindful, we allow those thoughts to exist without accepting them as true. Instead we remind ourselves, “I did not make choices today that made me feel healthy, strong, or energized. But I can make the next best choice.” Or, “Tomorrow is another day.”
This is called reframing, a process of looking at our thoughts from a different perspective. If the weather of our minds is dark and stormy, we can choose to observe this without judgment, saying, “That’s just a thought,” and then returning to our intention to begin again.
But how do you tap into that mindfulness? There are many ways to start, from Mindfulness Meditation to Grounding activities, to Mindful Movement to Loving-Kindness Meditation. Check out the following worksheet for tips to build your Mindfulness Muscles. Each moment may call for a different form of mindfulness. The more we practice mindfulness, the easier it becomes to know what we need in order to continue moving in the right direction.
Intention setting allows us to live in accordance with our values and remain connected to our purpose. When we remain mindful of our intentions, over time our perspective of the world changes. We are able to cope with the ebb and flow of life through the lens of awareness, so we may exist as we are truly meant to be.
Mindfulness teaches us compassion for ourselves. As the summer swells around us, let us set a collective intention to move with greater awareness. Together, we can change the world. But we must start by finding love, peace, and healing within.
Olivia Lynn Schnur’s writing is informed by her career as a mental health counselor and yoga teacher. She is passionate about wellness, and she enjoys helping others cultivate healthy and happy lives. To learn more, or to book a yoga session, visit oliviaschnur.com.
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