Gondola to Eden

I like to go running. And then I wake up wondering what was I running from. Was it a giant scythe wielded by a laughing witch seeking mold to make a potion to paralyze me? Could it have been a long winded lecture about a sabbatical gone mysteriously right but instead I get marked wrong for not knowing there was a tropical storm in the middle of Siberia. What a laborious run it must’ve been when I come out of it more rested than when I began. There has been a few runs where I wasn’t sure I would make it to the finishing point. Running so hard, pushing myself to the limit, beginning to slip and slide, now running in place, feet going every which way, arms a keeping my balance. I almost ate shit. It got all over my favorite State shirt. Figuratively I was covered in it but none of it was real. My next run I took it easy, took a gondola. I went up and so far back that I saw the old neighborhood. There I was tying fishing line onto bumble bees and sneaking fish in plastic bags next door because it didn’t make sense to just keep them in a tank for only me to see. That was real play though, I wasn’t trying to not fall and I wasn’t trying to fly, to jump and miss the ground. I sure as hell was on the run because up and away further the gondola went home north. Peering over the edge of the gondola I could see myself again but this time I was trudging along very slowly with great effort through the deep snow with my tracks half covered behind me at ten feet and beyond that only snow. I may as well had been crawling, tired, up hill, towards an image of drawing I will tell of all the dead plantings of fall. Now there is no life, only paralyzing agony as my dressed forearms push along the powder that finally gives way to my extended arms and bent knees in a dog’s stance as my face plants itself into the freezing mess of glistening wet pure snow, where the comfort of giving up finally lets me lie. But the gondola must be doing a marathon and so it moves along parallel to flat grounds of desert to presumably save me from laying there forever or at least until I woke up wondering why I wasn’t running. Some things are worth running towards, or riding and flying, even waiting for. It can be physically painful to reach the destination of yearning and sometimes we can’t retrace the path we took to get there. And while the next leg of the marathon gondola ride had me witness something so mind boggling I can’t bring myself to describe its violence and beauty. I will say this, that bunny rabbits run very fast to brier patches and eggnog tastes just as good in the spring. And so the ride had just begun.