Home
Buy Book
Blog/Wall
Press
Calendar
Gallery
Heidi Kole
Music
Videos
Mailing List
Bio
Film/TV
Contact

Posts tagged: Love

Feb 03 2017

Urban Sociologists

I always describe NYC Buskers (and the homeless for that matter) as “Urban Sociologists” as we are observers. We function on energy, on feeling versus thinking, the latter being what most of this particular city runs on. Innate & intricate observation of humanity & that 6th sense is how we survive, thrive & change other’s energy underground.

Today, standing on a busy corner on 10th Avenue I heard a tap, tap, tap and saw the red tip of a white cane, closely followed by an elderly man who clumsily rounded the corner, obviously not sure which direction he was to move next. I stopped & was just about to offer him help him when he said; “Can someone help me across the street?” I put my arm in his & said “I’m happy to help you. Which direction are you headed, Uptown?” “Yes” the elderly blind man said.

As we slowly walked across the street, everyone else scattered in all four directions without even noticing the elderly blind man, nor his plea for help. He asked my name, introduced himself as Joe & asked;”Where are you headed? I wondered if you could walk me to my bus stop?” “I’m headed where you’re headed. I’m happy to walk you Joe” I responded.

As Joe & I walked slowly up the hill towards 57th Street, he asked me what I did & he told me he lives in a group home & goes to a community center in the day to keep his mind occupied. “How is it where you live?” I asked “Oh, it’s ok. sometimes the people are…well…kind of a pain….” “Yeah, sometimes people, can be a hassle right?” “Sure can” Joe replied. “Probably’d be easier to live with a bunch of puppies” I chimed in, always choosing the fur babies. “Sure would!” Joe replied. Joe & I rounded the corner and I settled him at his bus stop. “Bye Joe. It was lovely walking with you & hang in there at your home” “Bye Heidi & thank you very much”

As I walked away scurrying to my appointment I was now late for, I felt grateful. Grateful of that 6th sense & to connect with someone who needed help, in the middle of this mad, concrete island. I know this is a busy face-paced city but my short visit with my new friend was literally the best part of my day & I wondered how many others on that street corner might have also benefitted from the gift of meeting & walking with Joe. I just happened to be the lucky one

Jan 21 2017

A little reminder from the Underground

Left in my guitar case. Thought it pretty spot on to share at this point in US & mostly human history ##Busk #Love #Compassion #Serenity

Dec 31 2016

Best Underground Compliment ~

Best busking compliment ever is when a straphanger comes up to you after your song & says: “I was on the train & got off when I heard your voice” #SubwayLoveTonight (Photo – Henning Fischer)

Nov 11 2016

You are a powerful being …

No matter who you voted, or didn’t vote for, slinging hate & blaming another for your sadness is not making this country nor planet a better place to live. Neither a President nor any one human can ever be your saviour. And it is dangerous to give that kind of power to any one human being.

A president can open the door, but we are the answer, the only answer to everything we see in front of us. The only way for you to have a voice & not get swallowed up by the globalists is to find a way to make a real difference in this world & do it.

The globalists thrive on division & fomenting such sentiments only feeds the beast. Find your passion, cultivate your passion, follow your passion & know you are a supremely powerful being.

Sending prayers for love, cohesiveness & much thoughtful & critical thinking before any action is taken

occupylove

Nov 11 2016

Aboveground Rest & Comfort

I was by The Hudson River when a woman with a scrappy, wet little puppy covered from head to toe in Hudson mud began tugging madly at his leash in my direction. I caught his owner’s eye and removed my headphones to hear her say: “Would you mind? Would you mind giving him some love? he’s been so uneasy today, and I don’t know why. Just craving some affection & love & I just know he won’t calm down ’till someone gives him some attention”

Me, as I walk over to the little soggy spastic creature: “I think most of us feel exactly the same way right now so I totally get it little one.” And as I petted the water logged, mud splattered creature he began to calm down & soon was leaning motionless against my leg in a little mop-like stupour.

Girl: “Thank you so much. He is so much better right now. You’re the only person who stopped”

Me: “What’s his name?”

Girl: “Noah” (Meaning = Rest & Comfort)

#GiveLove

scrappy

Oct 20 2016

Chaos

NYC is a city of chaos. Chaos is the rhythm of its heartbeat. Anyone who says otherwise hasn’t lived here. But where else on this planet can one live in the midst of such immense chaos all swirling in such seemingly perfect harmony perched on one tiny piece of rock. HK ~

ontrains

Mar 22 2016

Busktherapy

One of those nights on the platform when people seem to gravitate towards you, one after another, and proceed to tell you their life story….their ENTIRE life story ‪#‎Busktherapy‬ Photo – Jennifer Thomas

busktherapy

Mar 02 2016

Connect

Never fails to fascinate me how people show their appreciation or attempt to connect. Today a guy walked all the way over, the entire length of the platform, eyes fixed on me and smiling, not to tell.me something or drop a dollar in my case, no….he walked over to gently touch my strumming hand while I was singing. He touched it & walked away. ‪#‎NYC‬ ‪#‎Busk‬ Photo –Henning Fischer

guitarcolour

Jan 03 2015

‘In in alternate Universe’, my life just got a whole lot easier #Buskon

Rolling Stone

The NYPD’s ‘Work Stoppage’ Is Surreal

In an alternate universe, the New York Police might have just solved the national community-policing controversy.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-nypds-work-stoppage-is-surreal-20141231?page=2

workstoppage

By  | 

Brace yourselves for a weird night. There might be a little extra drama when the ball drops in Times Square, thanks to one of the more confusing political protests in recent memory.

 On a night when more than a million potentially lawbreaking, probably tipsy revelers will be crowding the most densely-populated city blocks in America, all eyes will be on the city cops stuck with holiday duty.

Why? Because the New York City Police are in the middle of a slowdown. The New York Post is going so far as to call it a “virtual work stoppage.”

Furious at embattled mayor Bill de Blasio, and at what Police Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch calls a “hostile anti-police environment in the city,” the local officers are simply refusing to arrest or ticket people for minor offenses – such arrests have dropped off a staggering 94 percent, with overall arrests plunging 66 percent.

If you’re wondering exactly what that means, the Post is reporting that the protesting police have decided to make arrests “only when they have to.” (Let that sink in for a moment. Seriously, take 10 or 15 seconds).

Substantively that mostly means a steep drop-off in parking tickets, but also a major drop in tickets for quality-of-life offenses like carrying open containers of alcohol or public urination.

My first response to this news was confusion. I get why the police are protesting – they’re pissed at Mayor de Blasio, and more on that in a minute – but this sort of “protest” pulls this story out of the standard left-right culture war script it had been following and into surreal territory.

I don’t know any police officer anywhere who would refuse to arrest a truly dangerous criminal as part of a PBA-led political gambit. So the essence of this protest seems now to be about trying to hit de Blasio where it hurts, i.e. in the budget, without actually endangering the public.

So this police protest, unwittingly, is leading to the exposure of the very policies that anger so many different constituencies about modern law-enforcement tactics.

First, it shines a light on the use of police officers to make up for tax shortfalls using ticket and citation revenue. Then there’s the related (and significantly more important) issue of forcing police to make thousands of arrests and issue hundreds of thousands of summonses when they don’t “have to.”

It’s incredibly ironic that the police have chosen to abandon quality-of-life actions like public urination tickets and open-container violations, because it’s precisely these types of interactions that are at the heart of the Broken Windows polices that so infuriate residents of so-called “hot spot” neighborhoods.

In an alternate universe where this pseudo-strike wasn’t the latest sortie in a standard-issue right-versus left political showdown, one could imagine this protest as a progressive or even a libertarian strike, in which police refused to work as backdoor tax-collectors and/or implement Minority Report-style pre-emptive policing policies, which is what a lot of these Broken Windows-type arrests amount to.

But that’s not what’s going on here. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing enlightened about this slowdown, although I’m sure there are thousands of cops who are more than happy to get a break from Broken Windows policing.

I’ve met more than a few police in the last few years who’ve complained vigorously about things like the “empty the pad” policies in some precincts, where officers were/are told by superiors to fill predetermined summons quotas every month.

It would be amazing if this NYPD protest somehow brought parties on all sides to a place where we could all agree that policing should just go back to a policy of officers arresting people “when they have to.”

Because it’s wrong to put law enforcement in the position of having to make up for budget shortfalls with parking tickets, and it’s even more wrong to ask its officers to soak already cash-strapped residents of hot spot neighborhoods with mountains of summonses as part of a some stats-based crime-reduction strategy.

Both policies make people pissed off at police for the most basic and understandable of reasons: if you’re running into one, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to end up opening your wallet.

Your average summons for a QOL offense costs more than an ordinary working person makes in a day driving a bus, waiting tables, or sweeping floors. So every time you nail somebody, you’re literally ruining their whole day.

If I were a police officer, I’d hate to be taking money from people all day long, too. Christ, that’s worse than being a dentist. So under normal circumstances, this slowdown wouldn’t just make sense, it would be heroic.

Unfortunately, this protest is not about police refusing to shake people down for money on principle.

For one thing, it’s simply another public union using its essential services leverage to hold the executive (and by extension, the taxpayer) hostage in a negotiation. In this case the public union doesn’t want higher pay or better benefits (in which case it wouldn’t have the support from the political right it has now – just the opposite), it merely wants “support” from the Mayor.

On another level, however, this is just the latest salvo in an ongoing and increasingly vicious culture-war mess that is showing no signs of abating.

Most everyone across the country knows the background by now. The police in New York are justifiably furious about the Saturday, December 20th ambush murder/assassination of two of their officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, at the hands of a rampage-killer from Baltimore named Ismaaiyl Brinsley.

Brinsley, who shot his girlfriend and promised on Instagram to put “wings on pigs” before coming to New York and doing the evil deed, had cited the killing of Eric Garner in his rants, saying among other things, “They took 1 of ours…let’s take 2 of theirs.”

According to the transitive theory of culpability so popular in our left-right media echo chamber, Brinsley’s monstrous act put de Blasio in the political jackpot, since both had expressed dismay about the death of Garner, an African-American man from Staten Island who died this past summer in a struggle with police over a 75-cent cigarette.

De Blasio of course never urged anyone to put “wings on pigs.” And his comment about the actual grand jury decision – that it was something “many in our city did not want” – was really just a simple statement of fact.

But de Blasio also clumsily personalized the incident, talking about his own half-black son Dante, saying that he and his wife Chirlane had had to “talk to Dante. . .about the dangers that he may face.” Then he added, “It should be self-evident, but our history requires us to say that black lives matter.”

As maximally uncontroversial as that sounds, the local tabloids went nuts over de Blasio’s remarks, bashing the boss of the nation’s biggest police force for quoting a globally-surging protest hashtag and talking about how he has to teach his own son to be wary of police.

And then Ramos and Liu were murdered in a horrible tragedy that will have lasting implications for people on all sides of the political spectrum.

The thing is, there are really two things going on here. One is an ongoing bitter argument about race and blame that won’t be resolved in this country anytime soon, if ever. Dig a millimeter under the surface of the Garner case, Ferguson, the Liu-Ramos murders, and you’ll find vicious race-soaked debates about who’s to blame for urban poverty, black crime, police violence, immigration, overloaded prisons and a dozen other nightmare issues.

But the other thing is a highly specific debate over a very resolvable controversy not about police as people, but about how police are deployed. Most people, and police most of all, agree that the best use of police officers is police work. They shouldn’t be collecting backdoor taxes because politicians are too cowardly to raise them, and they shouldn’t be pre-emptively busting people in poor neighborhoods because voters don’t have the patience to figure out some other way to deal with our dying cities.

This police protest, ironically, could have shined a light on all of that. Instead, it’s just more fodder for our ongoing hate-a-thon. Happy New Year, America.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-nypds-work-stoppage-is-surreal-20141231#ixzz3NoYQlrJb
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

Nov 08 2014

Moved again

Never fails to blow me away when a homeless person passes me in a wheelchair on the platform, then turns around & wheels close enough to throw coins in my case. Coins straight out of their paper cup‪ #‎somekindaundergroundlove‬ 

wheelchair