Parkour in the clouds

Take off and you are on your way. Off on holiday? Well, yes, I have been actually. But it’s more than that. I go to see and off discover. I’m on my way to experience and live. I’m off to gasp and stand in awe. I’m off to get my dose of this world. I need a fix.

Sit back and feel the surge as the plane shoots down the runway and eases itself and you with it in to the vast above the ground. Let me look down and see things getting smaller away from me. Let my eyes cover cities and mountains and lakes and all the things you don’t get to see by standing on the ground. Let me become an eagle, let me home in on the details below. Then take me higher and above the clouds and see the sunset on the horizon of beyond.

We are on our way, to see and discover, experience and live, gasp and stand in awe. But are we not already there once we are in and above the clouds? Are we already in another world, another kingdom? The Kingdom of white fluff? Take a good look out that small window and see it all sprawl out in front of you. Don’t miss this before you get up to ten thousand metres, because again you will be looking down at the fluff become a white carpet while the dark edges its way closer to you and the orange glare retracts to its horizon lair.

Don’t miss it but don’t worry, it will be back. When you get closer to where you are going you will get closer to the fluffy kingdom again. Your destination within a destination. Make sure you feel it though; those clouds towering and clambering and bouncing and wholesome. Feel how cuddly as a teddy bear they are, how you could take a mouthful like candy floss.

I have seen temples on lakes and hills and in towns, but I had already seen them in the sky – temples of clouds all around me, marshmallow skyscrapers to withstand any earthquake – it would be like a theme park ride if there was one up here. Palaces graced before me.  Hills and mountains we were climbing with altitude, or coming back down them as we descended. I didn't want to be in this plane to come down, I wanted to be in sledge, or a big black bin liner with all my friends on a joyride with no TomTom needed – just go down. Just let it go. I saw monuments created and beamed on with rays of orange and yellow from even higher above me as the big friendly ball of warmth comes out of its lair and roams the kingdom. Those monuments I fly between so often are monuments of my life. They will be here long after I am gone.

So we come down (from the sky…) and green seeps through the clouds and gets closer beneath us. We home in on the details of rivers and lakes and cities with their streets like threads of a spider's web spanning outwards, all the things that I had just seen but made out of white fluff. Don’t go down just yet Mr.Captain, let me roam a little longer, let there be a queue of planes to land, let us circle around again. I want to stay and explore some more, I want to run and leap from cloud to cloud, I want to Parkour. I want to propel myself in to my surroundings, to maintain my momentum and explore the potential of this environment, to see it with my body. Climbing, swinging, jumping and vaulting; under and over, around and through the urban of this cloud city.

I went away for two weeks but really I was away two weeks and two days, because those two days travelling to the other side of the world and back were part of the experience, included in the place I was going to. Those travel days always are. I am free running. Obstacles I will overcome.

Hey, maybe born from an egg on a mountain top, Monkey Magic will come up here and let me cruise on his pink cloud too. Even though the pink bit kind screws the image up a little.