The Listener

by Michael Schmicker

"My mother Rayanna never graduated from high school. She lived in Arkansas as a child, on a farm, and grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Maybe she ran around without shoes; I don't know, but I suspect she did. She knew how to pick cotton and hitch a mule. She could make corn bread (she called it corn pone) in a big black iron skillet. And she played the piano from a very early age. She didn't own one; they were too poor, but the church did. She was raised Baptist in a fire-and-brimstone family and attended Friday night church services and backwoods tent revivals where singing was the highest sacrament. She accompanied their voices on the piano, and when the preacher wasn't there, she played the blues like St. Louie Woman and Old Man River. But her real gift was the ability to listen to anyone who needed to unburden their heart."

So begins this brief requiem written by her son Michael at her passing -- a moving meditation on the transformative healing power of listening. "From my mother, I learned that listening doesn't require a college degree, professional training or expensive, sophisticated equipment. We can do it without a penny to our name, and do it whatever our age. We can do it anywhere, anytime, for as much time as we can spare. It costs nothing, unlike large government health programs. Unlike pills and medicines, it has no negative side effects. You need no one's permission to listen. It offends no religious belief, so is applicable to any person's faith, or lack of one. Yet it can produce miracles, restoring hope and confidence and purpose in people who have lost their way - as all of us inevitably do at some point in our lives..."

Troubled married couples, frustrated parents and children, confused friends and lovers - anyone struggling to build, or save, a relationship - should find in this small, powerful book a simple way to help restore hope and happiness to any shared life.

36 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 10, 2010

About the author

Michael Schmicker is an investigative journalist, Amazon Top 100 best-selling author, and science writer focused on consciousness research.

Michael began his writing career as a crime reporter for a suburban Dow-Jones newspaper in Connecticut, and worked as a freelance reporter in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and Op-Ed writer for the Wall Street Journal Asia,

A nationally known writer on frontier science, Michael is the co-author of "The Gift, ESP: The Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People" (St. Martin's Press (USA)/Penguin Random House (UK). His first book, "Best Evidence," has emerged as a classic in the field of scientific anomalies reporting since its first publication in 2000. BBC radio/documentary producer Keith Parsons named it one of the 10 most influential books dealing with the survival of consciousness question. Michael is a member of The Society for Scientific Exploration, where he has reviewed books for the Journal of Scientific Exploration, and contributed to EdgeScience magazine.

His latest book is "What Comes Next? An Investigative Reporter Uncovers Quantum Physics' Hidden Afterlife Hypothesis," (May 2024). Over nine million Americans have reported a near death experience (NDE). They’re virtually unanimous in their conclusion that the afterlife is real. Quantum physics suggests they may be right. As I show in this book, we’ve got strong scientific evidence from near-death-experiences research that our consciousness, our spirit, our soul – whatever we choose to call that which ultimately makes us be us – survives death. Quantum physics offers a modern, logical, scientific explanation for why that afterlife is possible. Our consciousness is not made of matter. The death and dissolution of the physical brain doesn’t affect our non-material consciousness.

Michael is also author of "The Witch of Napoli,” historical fiction with a paranormal twist, set in Italy and England in 1899. On March 6, 2015, it made the Amazon Top 100, ranking #41 in paid books out of 3.3 million books available in the Kindle Bookstore. That same day, it hit #1 in both the Historical Fantasy and Victorian Historical Romance categories in three countries simultaneously - the U.S., Canada and England. It spent 68 consecutive weeks as a Top 20 Best Seller in the "Italian Historical Fiction" category, with an Audible audiobook debuting on Amazon in July 2016. Amazon subsequently selected "The Witch of Napoli" as one of 25 Historical Romance Bestsellers to be featured by Amazon's new "Prime Reading" program.

Michael’s interest in investigating the paranormal began as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand where he first encountered a non-Western culture and people who readily accept the reality of ghosts and spirits, reincarnation, mediumship, divination and other persistently reported phenomena unexplainable by current Science. He spent his first year in Bangkok teaching English to middle school students at the royal Buddhist monastery of Wat Bowonniwet, and the subsequent two years writing and producing with Thai colleagues a Sesame Street-inspired educational television series for the Thai Ministry of Education.

Before joining Peace Corps, he studied documentary film production at New York University and the British Film Institute. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy; and earned his Master's in Educational Communications (Television) from the University of Hawaii.

He lives and writes in Honolulu, Hawaii, on a mountaintop overlooking Waikiki and Diamond Head crater.