My friend, Maya Stein, has been on a journey she’s calling Type Rider. She’s cycling from Amherst, MA to Milwaukee, WI — 40 miles a day for 40 days, beginning on her 40th birthday, which was on May 5th. Today is day 39. She’s carting along with her, in a little trailer attached to her bicycle, a turquoise Remington typewriter. Everyday, she sets up a workstation with a chalkboard that says” Write Yourself Here.” She provides passersby of every type of human there is with a writing prompt and has been collecting what she’s calling “The Great American Poem.” She’s also posting those prompts to a google group for those of us who are following along without having left home. 

What is this unending love
I choose to believe will heal me, 
and you, and the planet, 
will heal the madness that’s stealing 
my grand-children’s future? 
I feel it in the constancy of
the sun coming up in the east, 
the moon waxing full every month, 
the change of the seasons, 
the shifts in the tides, and 
in the certainty that all things pass. 
I am that crazy old woman 
in the middle of Times Square, 
laughing and pointing at the sun 
as it rises over the city, 
as itstreams its golden light
across 42^nd Street. I am the one 
who calls out to the rushing people,
“Behold! Behold!”