Dear Hossein,
I appreciate the news of all your activities during Ramadan. What a wonderful time of reflection, renewal, and celebration for all members of Congress 60. The cooking and eating together these past weeks is symbolic of recovery experience itself—our learning that we can achieve together what we were unable to achieve on our own.
It is a time of great joy here as well, as my daughter Alisha will be arriving this Monday for a week’s visit before returning to her teaching duties at the University. We are planning a short trip while she is here to one of our nature sanctuaries where we will spend the day taking photos. Alisha is quite a good photographer and I am looking forward to her teaching me some new approaches to taking photos. Last week, Rita and I visited a botanical garden in Naples, FL. I will send you in a separate email some of the photos I took there.
I am so delighted with your response to having our first paper out. It will be an important step in introducing your work and the achievements of the Congress 60 community to the world, as will be the two papers already completed that will follow this one. I am already receiving emails of appreciation for the paper and interest in the work we are doing together. I hope to do a blog on Congress 60 once I have this first paper loaded on my website that I can link readers to.
It has been pleasant in Florida, but Rita and I walked this morning around the marina and it was very hot and humid. On these days, we tend to want to hibernate inside, but they are good days for writing.
Recovery advocates in the U.S. are planning a major recovery celebration event on the Mall in Washington DC for early October. We have had some larger public recovery celebration events—mostly local marches or concerts, but this will be the first national recovery march. Are there public recovery celebration events in Iran? When we first started them here in the U.S., they were very small events with only a few hundred people participating, but they have become quite large. The last one in Philadelphia that I participated in had more than 18,000 people attending. There was a large march through downtown Philadelphia and then speeches and entertainment. It was a wonderful experience seeing that many people in recovery celebrating publicly with their families and friends.
Friends and Brothers Forever,
Bill
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