Friday Night at 8: Backalley Blogging – Leap!

Sometimes while prowling back alleys you find things that don’t bear the light of day, brass ritual cymbal turns out to be a trashcan cover, exotic seafood dinner is really rotten fish guts.

Yet perhaps there’s some truth to these lies.

Here in NYC the sun has gone down.  That’s the time to prowl.

You’re in kindergarten and some strange large being is telling you about reading and showing you something called an alphabet.  And you go with the flow and recite all the letters and hear how they’re put together and daydream and look out the window and listen some more and sneak candy from out of your desk and make faces at the other children when the teacher’s not looking and take naps on mats.

And then one day you can read.  You look at a page with black squiggles on it and all of a sudden they’re not squiggles any more, they’re words and you can read them.  You’ve taken the leap.

And life moves along and moves you along with it, you make a whole lot of choices and those choices lead you here and there.  You run into challenges and problems you could never have imagined and have to solve them and somehow you do.  You leap.  And you know you’ve solved them because here you are, you’re still here!

Sometimes you confront dilemmas where no answer seems right, and that makes you shake and moan and secretly pray to imaginary gods to help you out here, maybe you’re a soldier getting shot at in a war or you’re shooting someone, maybe your whole neighborhood is ripped apart by an earthquake or tsunami, maybe you’re living in New York City and a plane hits some big buildings and everything changes.

And then you see your country go nuts and do things you’d never imagine and when you turn on the television, well they’re all crazy, too!  So you stop watching teevee and take a walk and there’s some New Yorkers who aren’t foaming at the mouth so maybe everything’s ok.

But then it isn’t, and there’s a war that makes no sense and tyrannical monsters who have taken over the halls of authority and there’s choices to make and …

… you take a leap.

You decide that even if it’s only you and no one else, you’re not going to buy into the lunacy.  You’ll see your own way, thank you very much.

And the new journey begins.

‘Course this is not a one-shot story in the human world.  Every time there has been action for change, someone had to take a leap, had to see what was not there at the moment and somehow believe it would be there if one just took this path, and not the well trodden one.

The story of civil rights, human rights, is a story of leaping out into a great darkness and then forging a pathway from out of that darkness, bringing light and then inviting like souls to come along.

Leap.  Yep.  The purveyors of claiming bogus, shaky, illusory ground as real and desirable can talk as loud as they wish.  This prowler ain’t buying, no sir.

In the alleys, we leap when there’s a loud noise of any kind and we usually knock over the trashcans and make a big racket.  But that’s another story.

Happy Friday to all and hope everyone has a good weekend!