Publication date for “Talking To Animals” is May 2, Tuesday, and at Battenkill Books, we are streaking towards the 1,000 pre-order mark. Wendy and the gang at the Post Office here are bracing for a lot of work on Monday when Connie takes all the books there for shipment out to the world.
We don’t have an exact count – orders are coming in all the time – but Connie Brooks thinks we passed the 700 pre-order mark. All week, Maria and I have been sitting in the bookstore every afternoon with Red signing books so Connie can keep up with the orders, the biggest pre-order of any book in the store’s history.
There are still hundreds of classy custom-ordered tote-bags that celebrate dogs and reading, and I will sign and personalize every book ordered or pre-ordered from Connie. She will, of course be taking orders past the pub date. She ships anywhere in the world and takes Paypal and major credit cards.
This new way to promote my books seems to benefit everyone. It helps a wonderful independent bookstore survive in a small rural community, it helps an old and eager writer sell books when it is becoming difficult to sell books, and it keeps the culture of books and reading alive.
I am a devoted Amazon customer, but it will not be good for any of us if they become the only bookstore on the earth. Thanks to people like Connie, and to people like you, who order books from her, that is not happening. I sell more books on Connie’s website and on her phone (518 677-2515) than I used to do on a month-long book tour around the country.
We are important to one another and you are important to both of us.
And the book, I believe, is important to animals. The World Wildlife Federation reports that half of the animal species on the earth have vanished in the past generation, and I do not believe the animal rights movement has even begun to consider or address the need for finding ways to keep the horses and the elephants with us, rather than sending them off to slaughter and oblivion and extinction.
We need a new and wiser understanding of animals than this. The book also details my life-long work communicating with animals and learning how to listen to them. The best stories of my life with animals.
I hope you will consider ordering or pre-ordering the book through Battenkill Books, you will do a lot of good. I notice many people are thinking ahead, and buying the book as a Christmas gift.
Nice idea. The book is also, of course, offered as an e-book and an audio book, and is available everywhere books are sold.
You can pre-order the book here and help us get to 1,000. That will make a big noise in my publisher’s offices. This is the future, this is the way we sell books and save books. We’re very close. Thanks.
“We must be wiling to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed, before the new one can come.” – Joseph Campbell.
I have learned that life is always going to be sorrowful, it will always end in exactly the same way, and for everyone. Loss is the one thing we will all share, there is no left or right to loss, it is not a choice or an argument. We can’t change that, but we can change our attitude about it. And if we wish to lead a meaningful life, and know the peace of the soul, we must try.
Whatever we each believe, death binds us all together. There is no argument to change it.
A thoughtful man named Darryl came up to me at the Battenkill Bookstore today while I was signing books and said his wife had forced him to look at the Ted Talk I gave in Montclair, N.J., a couple of years ago. I remember that talk well, it was the first time I had returned to Montclair, the town where I had lived with my first wife for more than 20 years.
I had not set foot there once since my divorce, it was – is – a painful place for me.
The night before the Ted Talk I spent the all night throwing up in a hotel toilet. I was groggy when I gave the talk, and uncharacteristically nervous. I am at ease speaking in public, I almost always feel it is just where I belong.
But not that day, I felt it was the last place I wanted to be.
This talk was rough, but still, it was important to me, it was a manifesto on aging, a chance for me to challenge the awful ways in which older people are made to think about themselves. I hated the idea of the downsizing of life, and the way aging is seen only as a loss and sacrifice.
In my experience aging had been a time of great liberation, not just the surrender of life, as our culture seems to see it. A time to let go of some awful and heavy baggage. I no longer had to prove anything to anyone but me.
I was pleased that a horde of young people came rushing up to me after the talk and thanked me for talking about the promise of life and love, they had never heard anyone say that before about getting older. I was glad I gave the talk, I never heard much about it afterwards, it is rarely mentioned to me. Not too many people wish to hear about it or talk about it.
Darryl said he enjoyed the talk, it was the first time he also had ever heard anyone talk of growing older as anything other than a horror and the end of a true life. Our culture demonizes aging and focuses on the difficult questions of mortality, and then, death. Darryl was getting older, I could see, and he admitted to being frightened about it.
And I don’t blame him, aging is now a huge business in the Corporate Nation, a lot of people profit from it in different ways, but very few of them are old. Too often, I see older people who are prisoners of a system, not beneficiaries.
For me, growing older has been a time of tremendous growth and change, of a rich burst of creativity – my blog, my photography, my books – and of the discovery of true love and of love-making, which people my age are often portrayed as having abandoned.
You will never see an older person making love in a movie or television, show, that is considered disturbing and offensive.
If you look at older people in movies, books (we have vanished from TV and magazines, older people are always portrayed as sad and grim, disintegrating and incoherent and mournful. The portrayal of aging in America is one of the great creative failures of the young.)
For me, it is a good time, perhaps the best time. Getting old is hard in some ways, but then, so is being young. The truth is life is hard, we all suffer, we all have battles to fight.
Joseph Campbell wrote that one great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything.
This is a time of great liberation, everything is of the moment. For the first time in my life, I have nothing to want, strive for, or fear other than the obvious – there can’t be all that much time left for me.
Now, a time of teaching, mentoring, helping others, passing along what I have learned to those who wish to learn from it.
We have finally learned something about ourselves and the world around us, it is a time to accept ourselves, shed the hoary burdens and obligations of life (especially male life) and think of those who will follow this. I am learning every day.
We have no time for silliness like hatred and conquest and cruelty and envy. We know how to laugh at the world and shake our heads. We’ve seen it all before.
This new chapter, this idea I have about caring for others as well as for me, is a profound and sacred responsibility, perhaps the most important work I have ever undertaken. It is no longer a response, it seems to be who I am.
Erich Fromm wrote in his book “The Sane Society,” that love is not a passive abstraction but an active responsibility.
“If I love” he wrote, “I care, that is, I am actively concerned with the other person’s growth and happiness, I am not a spectator. I am responsible…”
He wrote about the need to love ourselves at any age.
Self love, he writes, is the opposite of selfishness. Loves makes us more independent, because it make us stronger and happier. In the experience of love lies the only answer to being human, in the experience of love lies sanity.
I reject the conventional American idea of aging, it is demeaning and small, like Old Talk. At Our Age.
It literally shrinks life rather than expands it, is a construct created by feckless culture and corporate greed – aging, sickness and death are immensely profitable, and the last thing the corporate world wants to see are older people running towards love and life and health, rather than away from them.
Nuts to them, I am a warrior for life, and love can come at any age once the heart is open to it. I’m not spending my last years living only to give money to people who care nothing for me and offer me only emptiness and sorrow.
I was doing my daily self-analysis this morning in the pre-dawn dark, as Maria slept soundly, as she always does, damn her, and I realized that the past few months has opened yet another new chapter for me, one I am very excited about and comfortable with.
Donald Trump started it, his election shook me and I realized I can no longer sustain the conceit of being indifferent to and detached to politics and values. I had to change and define my beliefs and go out and try to pursue and advance them.
I had to do good, I realized, rather than join the mobs of people arguing about what is good.
But that response is changing.
In recent days, I have begun to detach from the great Trump debate raging around the country and which has swallowed the media whole and hypnotized millions of people, many of them now addicted to confrontation and manipulation. It is not about him any longer.
President Trump and the media he professes to hate have become co-dependent, a condition I know and recognize all too well from my own life. I am sad but content to let them do their Tango together, until one or both drop from exhaustion and overexposure.
Neither can endure, there is nothing nourishing there, and they have already becomes insufferable bores. Let them eat one another.
I don’t have a great number of years to live, one way or another, and I will not spend them clicking on my Iphone or Ipad 100 times a day to see how much time broken and greedy and ambitious men and women can do to one another. I would rather use my life and my meager gifts to so some good.
There are not too many things I control, but one of them is my decision about how to life the rest of my life.
After November, I called for an Army of Good to form around my blog and work, and it did, and it has been a transformative experience for me. We have helped farmers, the elderly, refugees and immigrants, we have raised tens of thousands of dollars and bought soccer uniforms, trips to amusement parks, flowers and art supplies, blankets and towels and prayer rungs, flowers, boomboxes, printers, paintings, even a van.
We are grounding one another.
This effort is no longer a political statement for me, and has little or nothing to do now with Washington politics, which are unbearable to most rational beings. We shall all survive the left and the right.
But I am happy and engaged, relevant and effective. I am reluctant to write this in a way, it seems boastful, but it is also true, and I need to write the truth, I have nothing to lose any longer by lying or failing to see who I am.
I am learning that the best way to help mankind is to better myself. I can never make myself perfect, but I can make myself better every day.
So my life is not about what others think now, but about the moment. About my time. And I am more committed to it, beyond the grisly dance in Washington.
I find this new work suits me, fits me, lifts me up, informs and inspires my work, gives me focus and purpose, and sparks my creativity in new and powerful ways. It has even deepened the love Maria and I have for one another, it is another thing for us to share.
My little blog, my creative companion as I begin to be old, has never been more satisfying or meaningful to me, has never had more views and readers, has never been so powerful and wide-reaching. It is not little any more, it has reach and power, it is growing up.
The animals here are my Greek Chorus, watching, shaking their heads, demanding attention and perspective.
My readers are scattered everywhere, all over the country, from coastal cities to the rural and heartland interior I love to write about. We are bound together on a Great Adventure, one I never imagined just a few months ago.
And that is the thing about life, and even about aging.
Every time I think I know who I am, I see there is more to come, crisis and mystery is just around the corner. I told Darryl that none of us can hide from death or from the drama of aging. But getting older isn’t just about dying.
It is also about being born again, and we can do that at any age. That is not up to them, it is up to us.
