My friend Ali (Amjad Abdalla Abdullah) is out of the hospital, he is recovering from a nearly fatal car crash on an Interstate highway near Albany last week, his car was struck and rolled over twice. He was in the hospital for six days and has some stitches in his leg and is having some tests for concussion.
He says he is in some pain but doing well.
Ali says he misses his kids at RISSE (the refugee and immigrant support center in Albany) and is coming back to work Monday, perhaps sooner than he was supposed to come back to work. Ali and I have talked almost every day, and I am so grateful to count this loving and dedicated man as a friend.
He is truly an angel to me.
He is a teacher (and driver) at RISSE and he loves these refugee children, and they love him. He is also coaching their first soccer team. His devotion to these young people is inspiring, and I am going to Albany money to welcome him back and spend some time with him.
If the kids have problems at home, the parents often call Ali for help. He helps.
While Ali was in the hospital, a dozen kids came to see him, many of them in tears. Ali and I are going to sit down and make up a list of ways me and the Army Of Good can help him. We have already purchased 20 tickets to the Great Escape and Adventure Park in Lake George in July, bought some soccer shirts, and donated 90 art and creativity kits.
We are exploring art classes for some of the young artists in the group, and I will let you know about the other things Ali and the kids need.
He is a wonderful man, and RISSE is a wonderful organization, it is a gift to me to be able to support them. These are good people who have suffered enough, several of the children told me last week that me and the blog “came from heaven.” I am so grateful to be able to show them the true heart and soul of America.
They always ask about the good people who help them, and I say that people want to do good, given the chance, it keeps their hearts from turning to stone.
Ali always tells them “America is better than this,” that this is a good country with open hearts and souls, and we will hopefully show them that is true. He is planning some visits to the farm soon, and wants to get the soccer team focused. We are also thinking about an art show for the kids who want to make art.
If any of you wish to write Ali and welcome him back to work, I think that would be a great gift to him, a great lift of the spirits and a message to the children that they are not alone. It was terrifying of them to think of losing Ali, and they came close. You can write him c/o Ali Muhammed, c/o RISSE, 715 Morris Street, Albany, N.Y., 12208.
(Note: Please don’t send donations or contributions directly to Ali at RISSE, it causes all kinds of bureaucratic and bookkeeping problems. We are planning to set up a page or site where donations can be funneled directly to Ali and the refugee kids, that will happen soon.)
All of the contributions and donations will go directly to the children. And they need a lot of things.
Thanks so much for coming along on this new and remarkable trip. Life is full of crisis and mystery, but listening and doing good are better than arguing and wringing hands.
Heading for 1,000 Pre-Orders. Connie Brooks and Maria
I have a corner all set up for me and Red at the Battenkill Bookstore, my local bookstore. When she can, Maria comes with me and helps me get the inscriptions right, and Connie stacks the books and prepares them for shipment. I’m not sure of the exact figure now, but we are up to 700 pre-orders. Each of the people who order or pre-order will receive this very classy and custom made tote-bag.
I have my own table, my own tea and even my own pen signing kit. Maria and I try to do the book tour together, it is important to her and to me and we make a dynamite team.
I will also sign and personalize each copy (within reason) purchased through Battenkill.
We need a new and wiser understanding of animals if they are to remain in our world. We need to talk to them and listen to them, rather than project our own needs and emotions onto them. I think the book will help animals and also help people keep animals among us. Lots of anecdotes and hopefully useful information.
That’s the idea. You can order or pre-order the book through Battenkill, my local bookstore. They take paypal and credit cards, their phone number is 518 677-2515. There are several hundred of these neat tote-bags left and we will order more when we pass the 1,000 mark.
If there are to be bookstores and writers left in the world, writers must change, and readers must buy books, and not just from Amazon. I am changing, my blog is part of that, so are the donations and voluntary payments. I intend to be relevant, and to remain a book writer. For that matter, so are the tote-bags. We never used to give things away to encourage people to buy our books. But it sure works now.
If you are book lover, then this could be a chance for you to vote with your money, for a wonderful bookstore, for books, for me. We can’t just wish for books and bookstores to remain and thrive, we need to help. Because of that help, independent bookstores are making a comeback.
So are some writers.
Thanks for helping me move towards 1,000.
My publisher will pay attention to that. You can order or pre-order here.
The Art Of Listening by the famed psychoanalyst Erich Fromm was published in 1994, it became an instant classic and new and hardcover copies sell for up to $1,900. I have been looking for this book for a while, and finally came across a bookseller in England who had a paperback in good shape that he sold me for $50. I found out later that is in prison there and runs a used book business out of his cell in Cellblock J, his return address.
The book arrived today, and I am hooked on it, I’ve already turned down a dozen pages and will be up late reading it. I understand why it is so popular and difficult to find.
My prisoner-bookseller has a 99 percent approval rating on Amazon, and I was happy to give him five stars. Maybe I can get him up to 100.
I was despairing of ever being able to afford this book and I did not wish to read it on a Kindle. My copy is already thumbed and worn.
Fromm’s book is really about the power of analysis, but for many, it was his writing about listening and the search for unselfish understanding that drew me. I believe our culture and it’s people are forgetting how to listen, I know a handful of people in my life who understand that listening is an art, and is also the key to love.
Unselfish understanding is truly selfless, it is not about what we think or feel, it is about what someone else feels and understands. And if you can’t care about others, you cannot possibly understand them.
A woman messaged me this morning, she was unhappy that I was helping undocumented agricultural workers – some people still call them illegal aliens – because it is harsher. She could not understand why I helping our friend Camilla, she entered the country illegally and thus, she said forfeited any kind of sympathy or constitutional rights.
I was struck not by the fact that this woman disagreed with what I was doing, which is perfectly acceptable to me, but with her inability to have any kind of empathy for this women who gets up at 5 a.m. every cold winter morning and every other day of the year to clean up pig slop in knee-deep mud and manure and is thus partly responsible for the fact that we have food to eat. Her life is bounded by a small and decrepit trailer and the farm where she works and the houses that she cleans.
There is, I imagine, and any farmer will testify, not an American in our whole country who will apply for this work or do it.
I understand that we cannot let the whole troubled earth enter our country illegally and without resources and hope to survive, but I can still feel empathy for the people who have come for no other reason than to feed themselves and their families, or to escape slaughter and genocide. That, to me, can never be a crime, even if they cannot remain here. To me, empathy is not about agreement but about listening and understanding.
Our political system, to which we are now paying a frightening amount of addictive attention, is devoid of listening or understanding, and is thus ill. So are the many people whose hearts have turned to stone and who blindly follow equally addictive ideologies and arguments and become damaged and corrupted by them.
As someone who underwent analysis in New York City in its final sunset years in the 1980’s, I find the book especially powerful. I am so grateful for my time in analysis. Every good thought I have ever had comes from there.
Analysis is all about listening, so is life. And so is love and empathy.
The experience of analysis, something no insurance will pay for now, transformed me and was the beginning of my long and hard path to self-awareness and authenticity. I am still on that path, and will one day die on it.
“Understanding and love are inseparable, “writes Fromm, “If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.” That quote seems to capture the disease sweeping out country and its civic life.
Psychoanalysis, writes Fromm, is a process of understanding a person’s mind, particularly that part which is not conscious. It is an art like the understanding of poetry. The basic rule for practicing the art of self-awareness and consciousness is the art of listening, he writes. The analyst listens to the analysand, and the analysand learns to listen to himself or herself.
Fromm offers six rules and norms for the art of listening:
1. The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
2. Nothing of importance must be on his or her mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
3.He must possess a freely working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
4. She or he must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.
5. The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love.
To understand another means to love him or her – not in the erotic sense, but in the sense of reaching out to him or her and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself. It is a profound spiritual experience for me to truly understand someone who makes me uncomfortable or whom i strongly disagree with.
6. Thus understanding and love are inseparable. One without the other is an intellectual, not an emotional experience and the door to true understanding is slammed shut.
I appreciate the wisdom of these rule and norms. They are difficult to achieve, and few people try or even seem to grasp what listening is at this moment in time. We are at a point in our world where we are forever shouting at one another, talking right over each other’s heads, and the more we talk and argue the less we understand.
Many people listen only for the chance to reply.
Like the analyst, the listener must not try to please or impress, but rest within him or herself. And that is the hard part, to understand someone else we must first try to understand ourselves. In my relationship with Maria, I always understood that love was not possible without understanding.
The more we understood one another, the more we loved one another, in some strange way, it was just that simple.
Love and understanding are truly inseparable, and true understanding is impossible with empathy, the ability to understand others and to care for them, no matter what they say or believe.
Listening is an art, and one of the gifts of the past few months is that I am inspired to listen, not to shout.
Some years ago, I gave up asking “what happened to me?,” and instead began to ask “how do I feel?”
The first flower of the Spring, a daffodil, showed up to greet us this morning, and I was happy to see it. I am a color and light person, and while I appreciate the stark beauty of winter, I miss the color and the light, they are so much a part of me and my work.
I was happy to see this daffodil, that means her friends and cousins cannot be far behind. Winter has leg go, the earth is singing one of her sweet songs.
Often when I see Fate running, I think to myself that she is really flying, I hardly ever see her feet touch the ground. This can’t really be possible, she must touch the ground, but it feels like she is flying, she goes so fast and with such energy and enthusiasm. This dog is born to run.
