Saturday, March 28, 2009

Friendship

There are all kinds of friends - childhood friends, college friends, work friends, intellectual friends, friends of happenstance or neighborhood - but there is also a transcendent kind of friend, the friend of spirit.

Spirit friends reverberate at your own frequency - a sympathetic vibration. Any time together goes by far too quickly, and it seems as though the most important interactions are going on at a level that can never really be articulated. What is created between you is paradoxical - a new and always-changing thing that nonetheless somehow vectors the eternal.

It's stunning to me the way that existential effects can overtake any discernible cause. I've wondered sometimes if that might have been the kind of thing that the "communion of saints" or the Buddhist "transmission" were trying to describe - that resonating recognition of spirit-friendship. Have you experienced that?

A spirit-friend reconnects you, atunes you. It's not mystical as in a meditation, because there is content. Details matter. When you see the face of a spirit-friend, hear the voice, catch the cadences - your heart is glad. That heart-gladness beams me on.

I tend to shy away from socializing very much. I'm in many ways a very private sort of person. Also, as my hubby's ex-wife expressed it, I have a tendency to "try too hard" when I do get out and about. If it's a social situation where I feel uncomfortable or nervous, it can be painful.

This week was nothing like that. After darkness, joy.

No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. ~Elie Wiesel


This week's rhythms and syncopations wrenched me out of myself. I had been feeling so numb, so utterly sad - and then, from everywhere, gifts! I feel healed, and grateful. It's like a sweet angel observed me, just watching me think I'd pull a rabbit out of my hat. When I pulled a rhino instead, he turned to the cosmos audience and said, "Now here's something we hope you'll really like" and sent some friends to lift me up.

Yeah, that's it. My guardian angel is a form of Rocky the Squirrel... and I'm a deluded moose. I like it.

Gratitude is a vaccine, an antitoxin, and an antiseptic. ~ John Henry Jowett

2 comments:

zunnur said...

Hi,
I have a lot of friends but I don't socialize much as well. I think that blogging is an interesting platform to build nice friendship.

Solomon said...

I had one of these friends years ago. Right from the first moment we met, we were sure we knew each other, even though we'd never met. We got on amazingly well.

Sadly, we were only together for a season, not a lifetime, but it was necessary while it lasted.