Humbling

She was running.

Her feet thumped the pavement like worries. She ran though no one was in pursuit. An echo from some past dream had awakened an urgency that dragged her from the subterranean reaches of complacency to frenzy.

Her heart pounded, though not so much out of exhaustion as joy.

She ran like an outcast from some forgotten place. The sky was yellow when she’d begun and red by the time she realized that the landscape of her life had changed from poised and positioned to free. She ate a lunch of sweet cakes, honey and black olives before returning to the road.

Manna never tasted so sweet.

There was an undertow of exigency like a nagging pulse forcing life blood through tired veins. She was not adroit at running; tripping on rocks and troubles with equal clumsiness. But she always righted herself before tramping on. There was a candle in the window of curious little house that she passed along the Cape Fear Coast.

The odd symmetry of running in circles, though the earth is a circle so we are all running.

There were many who came and went along the way. She had slowed down for some and hurried past for others. It would be a lie to say she hadn’t lost her step on occasion, but she had redeemed herself from the sin of imperfection and returned to her former course, wiser and well trod. She’d loved and been loved though she couldn’t stay put. She was chased by monkeys at a temple in India where the moss grew high among darkened trees.

Longitudinally speaking she was usually silent except for the huffs and puffs of air she released unconsciously.

An old woman gave her orange slices that were dripping with juice. She ran through terrain familiar to both the Jewish and the Gentile troubling ancient dust with peaceful steps. There were children laughing in Gaza and children laughing in the heartland of America. Effigies of forgotten political figures were hanging from pole to pole with no one lifting up a gun or setting off a bomb in retaliation.

The world revolved as it always had been since before the beginning.

Yet she continued to run past and through consciousness amid cavalcades of recklessness and ruin. She had begun her passage with carelessness as her map maker and ended it when oblivion had closed her eyes. But that wouldn’t be for years yet. Now there was only the road before and after her with nothing between them but eternity.