Friends

Friends come in all types: a person sitting on a park bench, a train, or in a waiting room can share deep feelings. This short-term friendship carries anonymity with it that can open people up. Sometimes these are memorable experiences that last.

Moving around from place to place during our work years, we met many people who fit the category “friends of the road.” When you move, leaving behind long-established friends, it’s sometimes difficult to get started with new relationships. But friends of the road are important in life and can sometimes change into lifetime friends.

A handful of really close friends is a bouquet of beautiful flowers. They accompany you and serve as muses and models throughout your lifetime. These kinds of friends know you deeply and you know them. Decades may pass without their physical presence, but when you meet again, it’s like no time has passed at all. You know them and they know you.

There are two things I seek in close friends: honesty and spice. Honesty is being able to open up with the self-knowledge that comes from reflection and humility. Honesty also requires the ability to listen well, accept feedback, and the willingness to learn. Spice comes from a different place. Spice indicates struggle. Struggle flavors our beings with empathy, understanding and the ability to recognize our limits of understanding. Close friends share the rejections and betrayals they’ve felt, their inadequacies. Spice is often a little mischievous too. Struggles are resisted with spunk. Rejecting injustice with resilience may make a child into the black sheep of the family. But they bubble up as independent, overcoming things that may have otherwise held them back.

In my life I have experienced great acts of kindness, generosity, understanding and support from friends. Of all types. Humor is a great friend-building tool. My husband appealed to me because of his hard work and kindness, but especially because he can bring a smile, a surprising belly laugh, or a silent chuckle as I think of him.

The gift of friendship is a two-way gift. My feeling of gratitude is overwhelming sometimes when I think of gifts from friends. I do my best to be a good friend, thinking of their needs, staying in touch, listening well and offering from my heart to their beings. Giving is in itself a pleasurable experience. I love the response; I am buoyed by the knowledge that my action is helpful.

Giving is a powerful expression that can be an antidote to despair. Knowing that I have the ability to help others, be productive and meaningful for fellow human beings — and dogs, and horses, and canaries or crows or what-have-you — brings me great pleasure.

Recently I visited a lifelong friend living in another state. Towards the end of our short time together she presented me with a weaving that must have taken hundreds of hours. It was large and ready to hang with mounts attached. The subject was an experience we had together a few years before: the foam of waves flaming upwards. Flame waves, a phenomenon I had never seen before. The sunset hit the waves just right and the flames lasted but a minute or so. A memory encapsulated in her beautiful weaving. But the part that moved me most was when she said that she thought of me every minute she spent creating the piece. She looked me in the eye as she told me this and I recognized love and lifelong friendship again. Now as I look at the weaving, it soothes me and enthuses me. It caresses me. It holds me.

Copyright © 2024 by Addie Seabarkrob