Sep 17, 2017
Dear Hossein,
Rita and I are settling back in to our home in Southwest Florida. Power and internet have been restored for our home though many areas in Florida are still without power and there are gas shortages that will hopefully subside in the coming days. We were fortunate to escape severe damage, though many to the south of us were hard hit by the hurricane. News reports tell us this was the largest mass evacuation in U.S. history. In spite of that, our travel out and back home went relatively smooth given the numbers of people fleeing and returning. Such events remind us of our powerlessness in the face of nature’s wrath. It is quite humbling to witness such power close up and to see our illusions of control and comfort so easily punctured. I appreciate your best wishes through this process and also wanted you to know that I heard from some Congress 60 members presently living in the U.S. who wished we safe passage through the hurricane.
The evacuation has delayed final details on publication of my memoir but we should be able to proceed with that in the next few weeks. It will be good to have this project completed as it is a way to honor my generation of recovery advocates and pass on some learned lessons to the coming generations. I will let you know when it is released and we can discuss plans for our future collaborations.
A conference is being held in my home city of Punta Gorda in October entitled Multiple Pathways of Recovery to which I have been invited. It has been a few years since I have withdrawn from such participation but I have agree to do a Question and Answer session at this one. I am looking forward to seeing many recovery advocates from around the U.S. at this meeting. I hope to have the opportunity to share some of what I have learned from our communications and collaborations over these many years.
I’ve been thinking about proposing that we do a follow-up interview with your vision for the future of Congress 60. Would you be open to that? My thought was that we could work together on the questions and that you could then provide written responses. It could be a way to update our readers about Congress 60 and call attention to our earlier papers that readers may have missed. Let me know your thoughts on this.
Friends and Brothers Forever,
Bill