Live Full Throttle: Life Lessons From Friends Who Faced Cancer should be off the printing press in January, 2012.
Here’s a preview of the cover, introduction and first chapter…just scroll through.
After hearing hundreds of stories from women facing the ultimate sink hole –death–and doing it with grace, humor, moxie and joy, I decided to share what they taught me about life.
Live Full Throttle: Life Lessons From Friends Who Faced Cancer includes 100+ pages of full-color photographs along with essays and exercises. It will be off the printing press in January, 2012.
You can pre-order this $25 book today and receive free shipping and handling, a personalized message by me, and I’ll even pick up the sales tax if it applies. A portion of the proceeds will benefit cancer causes.
I’m writing a book profiling women motorcyclists who have either survived cancer or are living with it. It will be a coffee table book in full color with pictures of the women with their bikes. The book’s message: a cancer diagnosis is not a death sentence. These women will give you hope.
Prompt: Imagine you will completely lose your memory of 2010 in five minutes. Set an alarm for five minutes and capture the things you most want to remember about 2010.
My Kickstands UP party. Thanks to friends who took photos and to Channel 14 for the coverage, I can always recall it, even if my memory fails. Photography/video below by Andy Ciordia
Idaho with the Biker Bunnies. Their friendship, the beautiful sites they showed me and the laughs we shared gave me five of the most carefree days of my life.
Getting the news that my dear Dusty Price is cancer free. She’s proof that JOY is MEDICINE. Thanks for the joy you bring me and so many others, Dusty.
Seeing my boys in the crowd at Kickstands DOWN after 43 days on the road. Watching Tristan collect his high school diploma (and hugging his “other mother,” my dear friend Jeri Leach in this picture).
Funny, although I saw gorgeous places as I traveled across 20 states this summer, my fondest memories of 2010 come from what I did with the people in my life.
The prompt: Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?
Sure, I could have driven a car across the country this year. But doing so on a motorcycle allowed me to participate IN life instead passively observing it.
Everything’s more immediate and real astride a bike, from which you smell and feel the micro-climates and resonate with the vulnerability of the animals alongside the road. On a bike, you gain perspective on your little life within the whole of creation.
This volcano field reminds me how minuscule I am in the scheme of things.
The places I explored reminded me that destruction and creativity comprise the one circle of life. I thought about the mountains soaring overhead that were once seabeds and the near fate of Yellowstone as a lava field (it could happen any minute). Time and again I remarked that I wished I’d paid more attention in Earth Science class.
At 100+ degrees and with nary a drop of water to be found at Craters of the Moon National Park, I marveled at the ingenuity and resilience of humans who had come across this desolation and eked out an existence.
My religious background explains that there are two books of God: Creation and Revelation.
The first “book” is nature, which expresses the purpose of the unknowable essence as it unfolds in endless patterns in the observable universe. As Bahá’u'lláh stated, “Nature is God’s will and is its expression in and through the contingent world.”
The second “book” is revelation, by which is meant not a static and arbitrary set of doctrines delivered to mankind in finished form, but that progressive and dynamic power, conveyed through the written word, that has transformed human consciousness throughout the ages and which draws individuals out of the narrow confines of their own self-interest into ever-widening circles of regard for others.
This book of revelation has expressed itself through the succession of manifestations of God – Krishna, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, and, most recently, Bahá’u'lláh – that have given to humanity the sacred scriptures of the world’s independent religious systems. Steven Phelps
