Vol.2 - Issue 6 - Bury It With Seeds

CHASING THE RIDE

Every moment spent riding, buys you a memory. Make them great!

Friendly tip:

Cars making left turns across traffic and hitting motorcyclists are the most common two-vehicle accidents for riders.

Therefore, as you approach intersections, watch those cars in the oncoming turn lane. They may not see you or realize how fast you are going and may cross traffic even when you have the right-of-way. Or maybe they are going to race to try and beat that yellow light. Either way - riders suffer the consequences. So keep your eyes peeled at intersections!

If the worst happens on the road, or if you have questions about motorcycle law, call or text Rider Justice: 303-388-5304.

@MotorcycleRiderJustice

Motorcycle Lawyers Standing up for Bikers

VOLUME 002

ISSUE 006

from the founder bury it with seeds

death & life in memoriam of jim whiteshell

FROM THE FOUNDER:

For two years we have been building a brand. When it all started we were just a group of strangers turned friends from riding together. A little street in Portland, Oregon filled up with bikes multiple evenings a week and Kids & Cobras was born.

We are a tribe of people who simply love the shared adventure of life on the road with your best mates. We make our own fun and over time the stories have become an endless library of inside jokes and hilarious moments. Something real happens out there on the road and the Slow Mag is our contribution to celebrating and telling the story of the life we love to live.

Find a comfy spot. Brew up some coffee. And enjoy another round of Slow Mag.

For the thinkers and drinkers who love to ride fast and drink slow.

Full of Heart,

MPLS

MINN

PICTURES: NATHAN O’MALLEY @MAKEwellcompany Words: brock Junak @brockjunak

Brock Alan

It’s incredible how many people I meet on the road who say something like, “Motorcycles were instrumental in helping me work through a tough season.” Motorcycles are indeed ridden by people who have traveled through the horrors of things like divorce, addiction, a bad tour in the middle east, the suffering caused by the death of a dream or loved one, etc. These motorbikes are more than a fun hobby. They introduce us to people who have been through some stuff, and friendships are born. This is how I found the lifestyle on two wheels, and it has been so good to find solidarity with others in the same scenario. Life’s difficulties draw us together through these machines and remind us that we are not alone.

With that said, I am thrilled to introduce you to my friend Brock. Mr. Junak has become one of my best friends, and we share very similar stories. He is all of 5 foot 5 inches tall and has one of the most generous and compassionate hearts. For us, motorcycles have been the fire that fueled our friendship. Brock is the leading designer of the Slow Mag and is joining the Kids & Cobras team to help us forge a new path toward the future. I am stoked to have him on board, and I am really stoked for you to get to know someone who deeply believes in you and wants to contribute to the culture that inspired our existence.

Enjoy the read!

Alan Junak

What’s your name? Where are you from?

My name is Brock Junak. I grew up in Ishpeming, a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. AKA the only good part of Michigan. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with my lovely wife, Katie, and my two daughters, Maizy and Delilah.

What do you do?

I am a freelance graphic designer, and I own Kindred Studios - a branding studio.

How did you become acquainted with motorcycles?

My Dad got a Kawasaki Vulcan when I was 10 or 11. We were living in Wisconsin at the time, out in the country. He would take me on rides on the back roads, and I fell in love with the feeling of riding on a motorcycle - a paradox of exhilaration of serenity. I finally bought my first bike when I was 23 years old, and I’ve been obsessed since.

What do you currently ride?

I currently ride a 1998 Harley-Davidson Dyna FXD. I bought it from a lady who bought it brand new in ‘98. When I got her she was bone stock and bright red. She’s a work in progress but getting close to looking how I want.

What was your first bike?

My first bike was a 1980 Kawasaki KZ440, which I turned into a cafe racer like everyone else in 2015.

How have motorcycles impacted your life?

In 2015, I was deeply depressed. Mainly because I felt trapped. I was a pastor at the time, and I felt trapped. It was as though every day, I had to wake up and perform. Not only perform for people but perform for me. To convince myself that I was doing the right thing with my life. But I knew, deep down, that I was being disingenuous to everyone, including myself. Riding motorcycles was my one escape from that. I finally felt like I could be myself. At least for those few moments while I was behind the bars.

some really tough situations together. Fast forward to today - Jesse owns an internal finishing company, and I own a branding studio. We are much happier now and feel free to be ourselves on and off our motorcycles.

Motorcycles have also led me to meet some amazing people. My best pal, Jesse Meyer, was also a pastor at the time that I started riding, and he was going through the same process that I was. He had been riding for years, so we started hanging out more when I got a bike. Motorcycles brought us together and were the conduit to a deeper relationship, where we were able to struggle, doubt, question, and walk through

What I love about motorcycles is not just riding them but the relationships that they have led me to. Those relationships have changed my life completely. I still am a Jesus Follower, but it looks a lot different for me these days. It’s no longer me trying to get people to come to my service through gimmicks and hype while simultaneously feeling like I need to be a loud, energetic, outgoing person with all the answers to everyone’s life questions. And also being the model husband, father, and leader that knows everything about culture and trends and business and aesthetic etc. So that I can make people feel like they made the “right” choice being a part of my church instead of the one down the street. I’ve hung that towel up and am now just trying to love people well. That’s all I want to do.

Two years ago, I experienced the death of a dream, and the death of my identity followed. It was my greatest dream to start and lead a church. So when I was 25 years old, I left my full-time job as a youth pastor and began the difficult journey of starting a church. We opened the doors to the church a little over a year later. Our church was open for over a year, and it was going well enough; then COVID happened, and everyone’s world got turned upside down. There was so much bad that happened from the pandemic, so I don’t want to downplay that at all. But the silver lining of the whole thing was that I think it gave us all a moment to unplug and evaluate our lives from a 3rd person perspective. With that, many people on our team made major life changes, and we did as well. We made the difficult decision to not reopen the church. This might not sound like a big deal to many readers, but to me it felt like a part of me had died. I didn’t know who I was without church, nor did I know how I could contribute to the world. However, the longer I wrestled with the tension, and the longer I stayed away from pastoring, the more I began to heal and not feel so numb. I struggled to have hope; I struggled to dream about anything. Mainly because I was afraid to picture what my life would be

like if I wasn’t a pastor. Eventually, a spark came back to my soul. One that had been gone for years. When that happened, it was as if this outer shell that I had curated over the past 8 years of being a pastor began to break away and I was finally able to be myself again. I felt alive for the first time in years. The residual depression I had been dealing with for years started to wear off, and I began to feel hope again for the first time in a long time. And then the most profound thing happened, I started to dream again. Writing this out makes it seem like it was a quick process, but it took about two years.

When I finally emerged, I came back with a new dream - and thus, Kindred was born. Kindred is my departure from the mundane. It’s finally allowing the voice that’s been inside of me all these years to speak and be heard. Stepping into the life, I’ve always desired and allowing me to grab it by the balls. It has given me the opportunity to provide for my family while simultaneously taking a step back from pastoring and giving myself the proper perspective to move forward. The dream I am chasing now is not just a career. It’s living my life to the fullest. Loving my wife, kids, family and friends with everything that I have. And seeing every moment as an opportuinty to live an epic story. That is what I’ve come to believe that life is all about.

Tell us about a time in your life when you have had to overcome something difficult? How did you do it?

The death of my dream gave birth to fully living the life I was created to live. So without that death and burial, I would still be trapped. The new mantra that I live by is simple but profound. It’s what helped me navigate the death of my dream and what helps me on the other side of that season. It’s this - when your dream dies, bury it with seeds. My dream died, and I buried it. I had to move on. I couldn’t keep clutching to the past. But when I did, I buried it with seeds. Out of that, my new dream, my authentic dream, was able to grow and flourish.

So if anyone out there is like me and has experienced the death of a dream. My advice is this - pick up all the broken pieces, throw them in a coffin and start digging. Let go, move on, and bury your dead dreams. But when you do so, throw some seeds in the coffin as well. You never know; something beautiful may emerge.

How has art been an outlet for you?

Creativity is our most instinctual human characteristic. Since time began, humans have been creating. We create other humans, we create societies, we create countries, we create environments, we create cities, we create art, etc. When we suppress our creativity, we are suppressing our humanity. No matter your personality type, you are meant to create something. Therefore art has been an outlet for me because it allows me to express my humanity.

What’s one of your best memories of riding?

Every summer, the boys and I do a 2-3 day moto trip. Those trips are always one of the highlights of the year for me. However, what happens on the trip stays on the trip. So I cannot share details.

What advice would you give to someone who has never ridden before or is new to riding?

Know your limits, and don’t let anyone push you past them. You are risking your life by throwing your leg over the bike, so there’s no need to have a pissing contest.

When your dream dies, bury it with seeds.

Death & Life in Memoriam of Jim Whitesell

sam wake

“No matter how bad you think it might be, there is a good time to be had. There is light in the cracks of life.” - Brady Mclean

Have you ever given your all to something you were passionate about and come up empty-handed? If you have, I see you.

I am sending you a nod from within these pages of...

“I-see-you. I-get-you. You-are-not-alone.”

This past year has been challenging for our family.

My most important relationships have been strained.

My mom and grandpa were both diagnosed with cancer.

Mom beat it. Grandpa didn’t.

Leukemia took grandpa’s life this summer.

oak tree that my great Grandma Maxine and Grandpa Francis fell in love. They were grandpa Jim’s parents. In this article, I want to celebrate grandpa Jim’s life with you because he represents a generation of people passing away and their stories and knowledge with them. Grandpa was a backroad kind of guy. He lived boldly and didn’t shy away from danger.

Grandpa rode an 883 Harley Sportster. In the last few weeks of his life, he sold it to my mom, and I rode it out to his burial. It was a spiritual ride that I will never forget. As the engine thumped me down an old Indiana highway, I was struck with all kinds of feelings as I thought about him. Joy and pain existed in me all at once. His straight pipes thundered off the tall green corn towering on both sides of the road, and I was grateful.

I was honored to bury him on a little hill under a big oak tree in the middle of nowhere, Indiana. In fact, it was under this

The pictures and words that follow are in honor of him...

Years ago, I was dealing with the death of a dream and a deep sense of failure. It was agonizing. I felt worthless, stupid, and lost. Heavy feelings rested on me at night, and I struggled to sleep.

It was in that season that I started Kids & Cobras. I started it from the pain of my moment. Motorcycles were this outlet that gave me space to re-invent myself and process my pain. Along the road, I started to meet all kinds of honest strangers. They, like me,  were looking for a feeling, searching for a life they could be proud of, wrestling with their pain.

We are caught in the tensions of all that this life has to offer. We live between death and life victory and defeat loss and gain joy and pain struggle and peace riches and poverty loneliness and friendship etc... etc...

Kids & Cobras is a funky name... Sometimes I regret naming it this way. But then I am reminded of how rich the meaning is.

People always ask me, “What does Kids & Cobras mean?” Great Question...

We are all kids at heart trying to make sense of this dangerous world we live in. None of us have been promised tomorrow. Today could be our last day alive. No one gets out alive, and we don’t know when our last breath will be. We know that one day we will take our last breath and enter the mystery beyond. We are kids amongst cobras. Cobras are dangerous, and life is dangerous, but that doesn’t mean we should stop living and play it safe. My grandpa never played it safe. He had close calls his whole life. And heck, grilling chicken is also dangerous. Once upon a time, my brothers accidentally blew up my dad’s grill while trying to grill chicken. All that was left was a melted piece of metal by the time the propane bomb burned through the thing.

Life is a tension to be managed. Over time I have learned that how we manage these tensions will determine our well-being.

We get one life, and even though your heart might be beating, it doesn’t mean you are actually living.

My grandpa was notorious for wrecking airplanes. He was also good at flying them even when they weren’t running properly. I remember him telling me once, “If the plane is in the air, you fly it till it’s on the ground, no matter what.”

He had shoulder pain his whole life because when my mom was a little girl, his plane stalled over their farm. He was forced to land it on the tops of trees, and never once did he panic. He did just that. The plane descended gently on the forest canopy and came to an upright stop. But as the trees began to bend backward like rubber bands under the weight, the plane crashed through the branches to the forest floor below. The fall ripped off the wings and ruined the plane beyond repair. Grandpa’s shoulder was never the same after that.

He also happened to be flying without doors that day.

That evening my mom and her siblings hiked through the night to disassemble the plane under cover of a moonlit sky. By morning there was not a trace of airplane left in the woods. All the evidence was wiped clean.

Grandpa had a lot more life left in him, and if I could give you a walk through his shop down in Minden, Louisiana, you would see that he was neck-deep in all kinds of projects he was working on. My grandpa died dreaming up his future. His imagination was alive and well. Hardworking as they come, he lived the best he could till the day he breathed his last, holding my mom’s hand.

Grandpa was like you and me, imperfect. He made some bad decisions. But where he was different from so many was in the fact that his life was animated by grace. And grace is one of the most unique realities we have in this world. It’s a dirty word, and therefore it’s a beautiful word.

It means that EVEN THOUGH you may have made some bad decisions, screwed up, or are living with regret, you still deserve love. An unconditional love that holds no records of wrong.

That kind of love is rare. It can only be found in the rarest of individuals. People who love unconditionally are otherworldly. They don’t really fit in. They are misfits because they operate outside of what’s natural. Unconditional lovers are forgiving. They aren’t privy to gossip or holding a grudge. They love people because they are worthy of love, not because they have done something to earn it. That’s grace, and it is a dirty word.

Grace is loving someone even when they have betrayed you. It’s an undeserved gift. Unconditional love is messy work, but because of grace, it’s possible, and that’s where the magic of life is.

Sometimes life hits hard. Unfortunately, life often doesn’t naturally slow down for us to process whatever struggle or grief we may be working through; whether it’s heartbreak or the loss of a loved one, tragedy is just brutal. When the pandemic hit in 2020, we still had bills to pay and children to raise. COVID didn’t ask us if we were prepared for such a deadly virus to spread. It spread without our permission and added stress and struggle to things that were already hard. And when the burdens start stacking up against you, it can feel tempting to give up and throw in the cards.

I have a background of being around people when tragedy strikes. In my former life, I was a youth pastor at a church in southern Indiana. I was there when a student lost her dad to a sudden heart attack. I have stood in a driveway with strangers who were grieving the loss of their jr. high son, who had taken his own life. I sat with a room full of teens and their parents as they grieved the death of a peer who was tragically killed along with her father and grandmother in a car accident. We gathered together the day she passed, and the sadness in the air was like a heavy fog making it hard to breathe. But there, in the midst of that pain, we sang a song together.

It went like this... “When peace like a river attendeth my way

When sorrows like sea billows roll Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say It is well, it is well with my soul

It is well With my soul

It is well, it is well with my soul”

The man who wrote it had experienced extreme grief, having lost his daughters at sea. His wife survived their children on a voyage to England. When she arrived, she wrote him of the dreadful events that occurred. Upon his voyage across the Atlantic to see his grieving wife, he penned those words at the site his daughters drowned in the sea.

Tragedy sucks. Loss is incredibly hard. Heartbreak is borderline unbearable. Defeat is hard to swallow.

But no matter how bad it can be, light shines through the cracks of our broken hearts.

Heartbreak feels like the death of our soul. But the blessing is that we discover how deeply we can feel. It’s in the tension between death and life that we have the opportunity to become our best human selves. It’s in the & between things where we work out what it means to be human.

Grandpa Jim Whitesell lived to the full. He did his best to manage the “AND”.

I stood on that hill burying his ashes as a strong midwest storm blew in from the east. It’s nasty dark blue clouds slowly rolled across the green fields our way.

My dad, a fella named Chompy that I met at the burial, and I hopped on our motorcycles and raced back to town, trying to beat the storm. The leaves on trees in the midwest turn upside down when storms blow in and the temperature drops a solid 15-20 degrees. Lightning in the distance struck the earth and we ripped back on the throttle in a hurry. The road took us past Grandpas boyhood home and I couldn’t help but think...

are of epic adventure, legends that will be sung, into the future.

But then on a day as fast as they came they die to be buried beneath their name just down the road under the oak where life once teemed for the old risky bloke

One generation bursts into this world, swaddling babes with cries of life. They live meaningful days, and toil on to one day be buried by their wife. The stories they tell,

BUILDING A BRAND IS DIFFICULT. WE’RE HERE TO ease the process.

Good times since 2006.

WWW.BILTWELLINC.COM @BILTWELL

JOSH GILBOW OPERATIONS MANAGER

PHOTO: GEOFF KOWALCHUK