"Friendship is a mirror to presence"
The title (and all the following quotes) are from the entry on Friendship in David Whyte's book Consolations. I've been wondering lately why it is my friends love me and I them. What did I do to deserve this? I can list reasons I love people, but in the end there is nothing they have to do or be—that love just is, will always be there.
Earlier this day, I joined a friend in their garden pulling up some of last year's plants and laying mulch over them. While we worked, these mountainsides were lit so graciously in somewhat cloud-diffuse light: blue, fir-speckled white, and gold. Later, biking up with the camera, I liked the pinky, golden light up on the snowy firs.
I was with another dear friend in the evening. I admired the ever increasing warmth and cheer of his relatively new home, and we made some tasty tortilla pizzas, then shared and celebrated. Biking back home under bright, pin-point stars, I wondered again how it is I found myself connected to such wonderful people.
Look at that sun pillar! It was fading when I took this photo, but you can see that it went up pretty high!
"Through the natural surprises of a relationship held through the passage of years we recognise the greater surprising circles of which we are a part and the faithfulness that leads to a wider sense of revelation, independent of human relationship: to learn to be friends with the earth and the sky, with the horizon and with the seasons, even with the disappearances of winter, and in that faithfulness take the difficult path of becoming a good friend to our own going." ~David Whyte
"Friendship transcends disappearance: an enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversational way, even after one half of the bond has passed on." ~David Whyte
I'm thinking of you, Kris, now four years gone, your absence in the queer community. I'm thinking of all the things you might have done or said, my wishes for you arrested. I'm thinking of what you did leave in the world. I took this photo for the muted colors of winter beautiful.
"But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long, close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone." ~David Whyte in Consolations.