Friends

I’ve been thinking a lot about friends lately.  I’ve moved numerous times in my life and know that it takes a bit of effort to make and keep a close acquaintance.  In my most recent move, I was lucky that a few friends came quickly and easily to me; like an ember waiting for a bit of oxygen we burned bright the first time we sat down for coffee together. It felt like my deepest nature was understood.

It is not always that way.  On another move I remember saying to my sister that after a year I felt like I had made one intimate friend.  Sometimes familiarity is more of a slow unravelling; a strand here, one there before the bond begins to grow.  It is my experience that this kind of friendship can’t be rushed, and years later even it is still possible to overstep privacy and damage intimacy.

Perhaps it is the difference between people who are essentially similar to your nature and those who are not.  In any case, I am grateful for all my friends, and grateful I know how to go out and keep meeting new ones, as each person teases out 40 years of interests, ideas, mistakes, learning, and more:  Recently I attended a reading by author Molly Peacock and she challenged us to think of our art as a conversation or gift between friends, not as a solitary act carried out in isolation at home.  Think of that! The act of creation as an expression of intimacy shared between friends.