I wrote so much more in 2023 compared with 2022. Setting up some recurring themes and columns gave me structure that I stuck with, and my morning poetry reading practice gave me fodder for a variety of collections. I wrote only three posts in 2021, not at all in 2020.
We live with the presence of COVID with few precautions now, and I still haven't had it. Thank you, scientists who developed the vaccine and boosters! I still mask on airplanes where I'm sitting in close proximity to strangers for hours, or when I'm around someone else who is masking, figuring they're immunocompromised or live with someone who is and I can provide that additional level of protection. I write this because I don't want to forget in future years that it was still present, still killing people, still affecting our lives.
I'm still teleworking nearly 100% of the time, with a few more in-person meetings with my work team as it grows. That growth doesn't show up in my blogging since this is all personal, but it's been amazing and wonderful to recruit so much talent this year, with a few more positions to fill in the new year.
This is all thanks to the passage a couple of years back of the Climate Commitment Act, which has made it possible for the Washington state legislature to invest far more in clean, green active transportation along with transit, rail, ferries, and alternative fuels. I'm motivated in my work every day by the knowledge that the planet is genuinely on fire and we have to take action if we are ever to bend that deadly curve, and also by my knowledge that the number of people dying on our roads in crashes is also going up and we need to bend that deadly curve too. The work I lead offers solutions to both of these enormous challenges, along with giving more people access to the joy and freedom of bicycling and the community connections of walking or rolling. I feel so lucky to be always doing work I believe in.
January: I kicked off the year with a preview of the bike events and challenges for the year, Reasons to Ride in 2023: A Forecast of Biking to Come. I was still doing physical therapy for the wrist I broke in September 2022 but was finally able to get on my bike. Living in Olympia means my winter riding has more to do with rain than with snow, but either way Riding Always Makes Me Happy. Yes, Always. The end of January brought another of our now-routine weekend walks to the farmers' market and a happy discovery: Walking in January: Of Gloves and Poetry.
February: Over on my bike blog I decided to start re-upping some of the older posts that still resonate for me and that aren't too dated. Hence Riding Down Memory Lane: February, which launched a monthly series that highlights that month's bike events and my old posts from that month. I retooled some of a keynote speech I made last fall into a column, How Am I Going to Get There? Why We Need Each Other. In one of those cross-fertilizations the world wide web makes possible, a prompt from an online community led to sharing a photo of my grandma's old rocker in a different online space, which came together in The Rocker. I've written so much about bicycling over the years that I decided my January post on my walks should become the first in a series to celebrate the experiences of moving more slowly. Knowing I'd be writing about my walks led me to greater mindfulness and attention to small details that showed up in Walking in February: Of Woods and Water. This one commemorates a great weekend trip with friends to Lake Quinault, and I'll be going back. So, so beautiful.
March: Continuing the events/blog post review series on Bike Style, I published Riding Down Memory Lane: March. Harking back to the bikespedition posts I used to produce when I lived in Spokane, I produced what I hope is the first of many pieces about places to ride in Olympia, Olympia Bikespedition: Poetry and Art, Eastside Edition. Walking in March: Of Woods and Work had me in a different forest than my February walk, still appreciating the beauties large and small all around me in the park near our home. I'd been collecting links to poems I encountered in my morning reading and saving up until I had enough for “Safe passage through countless intersections”: A Baker’s Dozen of Transportation Poems.
April: You guessed it—Riding Down Memory Lane: April kicked off the month. A trip to DC for a conference resulted in Walking in April: Of Multimodal Miles and Museums. Later that month, some proof that social media may be dying but isn't dead, since some folks on both the dying bird site (Twitter) and Mastodon made contributions to Hashtag Bikes, a round-up of (some of) the many, many hashtags bikey folks use when talking about our favorite invention online. I had the fun of being a co-leader with friend Stefanie of my neighborhood's ride to join the Earth Day Market Ride. The ride is organized by Duncan Green, long-time staff at Intercity Transit whom I first met back when I worked at Washington Bikes. I commemorated this fun little ride with Biking in Olympia: Earth Day Market Ride.
May: Riding Down Memory Lane: May had to happen since May is National Bike Month. Maybe I should have published a round-up of bike poems to celebrate; instead it was “Do Not Drive Through, This Poem’s In The Way”: Transportation Poems Keep Rolling In. A conference in Seattle (yes, my job involves going to lots and lots of conferences) led to Walking in May: Of Downtowns and Dancing.
