With the return of Spring, the Fiber Chair has come out of winter storage in the barn, it is Minnie’s favorite chair, and Minnie has also come out of storage in the warm basement, where she and Flo slept at night all through the darkest days of winter. The world looks right, everything is as it should be, in its proper place.
The last thing I wanted to do when Ed and Carol Gulley came over to tell us about his brain tumor was to get emotional. Ed, for all of his sweetness and great heart, is a man’s man, which I am not, and I knew he would not want to see a trace of pity or to be seen as a sick or needy person.
And whatever happens to him, i will never see him in that way.
Ed is one of those men I envy and write about, they seem to understand how the world is put together, while that has always eluded and bewildered me.
Ed can skin a bear or dissemble a tractor engine or impregnate a cow or fix a fence as easily as I write or take a photo or use a computer or Iphone, which he does not know how to use and has no desire to learn to use. He is also a brutally honest man, and does not fall to self-delusion or self-pity. He will be happy to recover, he will fall with grace, if need be.
We may be brothers from the same mother, but we are also children of very different worlds, one of the reasons we have come to love one another. We don’t really need to do too much touching or hugging. I think we each have great respect for what the other knows how to do and is willing to teach.
Ed is a remarkable man, part farmer, pilgrim, seeker, artist, blogger, author, and philosopher.
It is true that when we became friends, I urged him to think outside of the narrow confines of the farm, as wonderful as a farm is, it can also be confining and narrow. And exhausting.
Ed’s mind is much bigger than any chunk of land, cows or not. Being busy, he once told me, is not the same thing as being creative, or as learning how to think.
From the outset, we have spoken truth to one another. That must not change.
Early Tuesday, Carol messaged me to say Ed wanted to talk with me, they were coming over in the early afternoon.
He had something important to say to me. I wondered, of course, what it might be.
I offered lunch and Carol quoted Ed (he does not text, of course) and he said it was up to me, it wasn’t necessary to feed us. I answered that I wasn’t asking, I was telling him to come for lunch, and that was that. He knows when to give in. Ed never wants anything from anybody, and will never ask for help.
Ed can listen to me, and sometimes does, even though he could snap me in half like a twig if he wished. That is friendship. We trust each other.
We have the shared experience of doing what we love and perpetually warring with the world beyond. And losing. In the Corporate Nation, outcasts and oddballs live on the edge of life, always fighting for our place in the world.
In our lives, we are always the Light Brigade, rushing into hopeless struggles, outnumbered and outspent and discarded, somehow living to fight again. Now, he is in the biggest battle yet. I will need to figure out my role.
When Ed sat down in our living room yesterday, he was understandably emotional, and I was eager to hear what was on his mind.
He did not want a thing from me, of course, other than to thank me for urging him to see the world beyond the farm. How telling that this was the first thing he wanted to do after learning about his cancer.
Then it was my turn to get emotional, and thank him for the many gifts of his friendship and the things he has taught me.
By now, I was just mumbling – and then, we were done with that and got back to our normal banter and laughter. We are, after all, just men, we are so limited in what we feel free to express.
I’ve been thinking all night about how to help Ed get through this. It is tempting to say, oh you’ll be fine, it’s probably nothing, something the medical magicians can just fix, but that isn’t what I feel or believe. I’m not a psychic, I have no idea what will happen, but this will not be simple or simply resolved, Ed knows that without my telling him.
Ed and Carol have a loving and devoted family, five children who are already jumping in to take over the daily operations of the farm. Ed said yesterday was the first morning that he slept late in 30 or 40 years. He liked it. He’s ready. He doesn’t need or want my physical help.
He told me there was a giant wooden gorilla for sale at a roadside stand in Maryland that he wanted to go and bring home, he planned to sit every morning outside with the gorilla and some coffee and shout to the world: “I’m still here!” I said that this was a breakfast group I wanted to join. This is a uniquely Ed Gulley ambition.
Ed’s friends and fellow farmers are learning about his tumor and beginning to respond.
Other farmers are organizing a fund-raiser, which I will certainly support. But he doesn’t want any financial help from me, and would not accept it.
I asked him how we could help him, and she said, “just be there and listen.” I wrote yesterday that what he wanted from me was actually nothing but to listen. Allyson on Facebook immediately and properly called me out, writing that “listening is not nothing.”
She is quite right of course.
I have learned to listen in the past decade or so, and worked hard at it. It is a hard thing to learn.
In hospice, the social workers call it Active Listening.
In hospice or the Mansion or even in the refugee volunteer work, I am not there to tell people everything will be fine, or to offer my wisdom and assurances.
I am there to listen, to be someone people can talk to and share their fears and joys and feelings, things people are often reluctant to do openly, especially in front of their families.
I have no miracles in my pouch, I can’t alter fate or tell life what to do. I am not there to make people feel better and offer false assurances. Most people – Ed certainly – know where they are in life. They should be free to feel what they need to feel. Sometimes life does suck.
I first witnessed Active Listening when I underwent psychoanalysis in New York City some years ago. The Freudian analysts know about listening, it is their stock and trade.
My shrink was a magnificent, imposing, older woman with a bun, She was a student of Anna Freud in Vienna, and she had the most piercing and penetrating gaze. She was the first true listener I ever met, she focused on me completely and seemed to hear and consider every word I said. I always felt I had her full attention, for more than four years.
I have become an effective listener at the Mansion, or among the battered refugees, where people often need someone to just hear their stories, not to tell them everything is okay. It is all right for them to be sad, angry or frightened, or happy. I wasn’t trying to cheer them up, a reflexive habit of people visiting the sick or the dying.
Listening is not nothing, as Allyson pointed out, but it is very nearly a lost art in our culture, where people love to tell one another what to do, think and feel. Social media is mostly about talking, not listening. Active Listening is about concentrating, using my senses as well as my words.
Erich Fromm, the analyst and author, has written a great deal about the Art Of Listening, he even wrote a book about it with that title. Last night I couldn’t sleep and was reading it through the dark hours so that I could be prepared to listen to Ed when he needs me to.
Listening, writes Fromm, is an art just like poetry, and like all art, it has its basic rules and norms. When he wrote about listening, he was thinking of psychiatrists, but the rules for listening apply just as well to me or anybody else.
The first rule of Active Listening, wrote Fromm, is the complete concentration of the listener. He or she cannot be distracted, casual. When I listen in this way I clear my head of other thoughts and sounds, I make sure I am comfortable and can concentrate.
I clear my mind. I must be thinking of nothing of any importance, I must be free of anxiety, greed, regret or ambition, the things that often clutter our minds.
I must posses and use a freely-working and active imagination, sufficiently tangible to be expressed in words when the time comes.
I must have a capacity for empathy with another person that is strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were my own. Empathy is hard to come by in our society, we value conflict, argument and judgement rather than compassion. How much empathy is there on Twitter?
To possess the gift of empathy is essential to love. To understand another means to love him or her – not in the erotic sense, but in the sense of reaching out to him and overcoming the fear of losing oneself. In the sense of helping.
Understanding and loving are inseparable. Otherwise, listening becomes a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding and connection closes.
The basic rule of Active Listening, writes Fromm, is to permit the person talking to say everything as far as he can.
For the person in need of talking, there is nor moral or other obligation of any kind. He or she does not need to be accurate, fair, or even to be telling the truth. There is no such thing political correctness in Active Listening, no social rules of behavior. The talkers are not corrected or criticized in any way.
When I listen to someone in need, I answer any questions I am asked about me. I don’t look to engage in small talk or politeness, I put aside the normal needs of the ego to be wise, to impress, to offer easy answers, or the answers people wish to hear. I rest within myself, and I believe the best listeners are the people who have done work on themselves.
I have been in various forms of therapy for more than 30 years. I have done work on myself. I am learning how to listen.
So that is how I believe I can help Ed, just as he asked.
Listening is not nothing, as Allyson pointed out, and he has told me clearly that listening is what he needs.
