Faith and Values: Meditative practice of biking helps keep level head as we remember those killed by federal agents

There were 15 of us on the ride for Alex Pretti. We gathered in Moscow, Idaho, on a chilly afternoon, some faces familiar, others new. We should have had a banner with his name on it – something to wave at passing cars, an invitation for other cyclists to join us. But we didn’t plan that far ahead. The call had gone out across the country: Ride for Alex. He was one of us, a cyclist, and he died on a Minneapolis street with federal bullets in his body.

Before we took off, the organizers read Robert Arnold’s poem, “A Bridge Too Far.” His words have been running through my mind ever since: “He was 37 years old. He was an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA. The kind of nurse who walks into rooms where fear lives and doesn’t flinch.”

Alex Pretti spent his days keeping people alive. On Jan. 24, video shows him holding a phone, trying to document federal agents, trying to help someone who’d been pepper-sprayed. Ten shots in a matter of seconds. A healer killed by the state he served.

Two weeks earlier, Renee Nicole Good was shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the same city. She was 37 years old. A mother of three. A member of the LGBTQ community – my community. Video shows her Honda Pilot moving slowly forward. An agent fires through the window. Three shots in less than a second.

The anger I feel about this is visceral. Children in Spider-Man backpacks being led away from their driveways. Renee bleeding out in her car. Alex’s parents calling the official narrative “sickening lies.” As Arnold writes, “This is the fear people are talking about now. Not a fear of chaos, but fear of normalization.”

So what do I do with this anger? What do any of us do when nothing we say or do seems to matter?

I ride.

The 15 of us who showed up won’t stop ICE. We won’t undo racism or hatred. We won’t bring back Renee or Alex. But as we pedaled together – strangers and friends united in grief – something shifted. The anger that had been calcifying in my body began to move.

This is what I’ve learned from years in the saddle: Emotion needs somewhere to go. Anger that sits still becomes paralysis. But anger in motion transforms into something else. Not acceptance. Not surrender. But sustained capacity for witness and action.

My Buddhist practice teaches me the Middle Way – not suppressing emotion, but not being consumed by it either. Right Action doesn’t mean effective action. It means action aligned with our values, even when the outcome is uncertain. The ride was Right Action. Showing up was Right Action.

Arnold asks the question that matters: “Who are you loyal to? A man or an idea, a regime or a republic, force or conscience?”

Meeting cyclists I’d never known before, seeing them show up for a nurse they’d never met, reminded me we’re not alone in answering that question. We need to stick together. We need to speak out. We need to keep moving.

Because if I let the anger fester, if I let the accumulating grief paralyze me, I lose my ability to do anything at all. I can’t write. I can’t teach. I can’t show up for the work that still needs doing.

But when I ride, the weight distributes differently. The rhythm of the pedals becomes a kind of meditation, a way to process what feels unprocessable.

“Say his name,” Arnold writes. “Say it slowly. Say it like you are trying to remember what a human life is worth in a country that keeps forgetting.”

Alex Pretti. Renee Nicole Good. I say their names while I ride. I remember they were people who believed in showing up, in bearing witness, in doing the work of care and conscience. They didn’t die because they were dangerous. They died because power decided they were obstacles.

The republic does not collapse all at once, Arnold reminds us. “It collapses when people decide that this moment is tolerable. When they decide that this life is expendable.”

I can’t make it stop. None of us can, alone. But I can refuse to let it become tolerable. I can keep moving – literally and figuratively. I can show up on the next ride, write the next column, teach the next class. I can be present to the grief without letting it consume my capacity to act.

The 15 of us who rode for Alex Pretti were a small act of defiance. Our presence said: not tolerable. Our pedaling said: we remember. Our gathering said: we’re still here, and we’re not surrendering our humanity or our hope.

Sometimes that’s all we have – the choice to keep pedaling, to stay in motion, to refuse paralysis. It won’t change everything. But it might change us. And maybe that’s where resistance begins: in the daily decision to transform anger into movement, isolation into solidarity, despair into hope.

Tracy Simmons, a longtime religion reporter, is a Washington State University scholarly assistant professor and the editor of FāVS News, a website dedicated to covering faith, ethics and values in the Spokane region.