If I Wrote You (Dar Williams)

I've been pondering the types of friendship lately and, despite (or is it because of?) the fact that intimacy brings intensity, I still willingly continue to run the risk/reward - the last nine years have certainly taught me lowered expectations, patience/tolerance and carpe diem. Whether "for a reason, a season or a lifetime", I can't imagine doing it any other way - that would be wholeheartedly (pun intended... :-)

From Appetites: On the Search for True Nourishment, by Geneen Roth:

"We need to build our friendships on truth and wholeness and expansiveness. We need friends who can be with us in our loneliness, not people who will cheer us up so that we don't feel it. We need friends who get furious with us when we are not being real or true to ourselves, not who get angry when we don't do what they want us to do. We need friends who are not afraid of our pain or our joy. We need friends who are not invested in the way we look, what we do or what we feel, who are willing to see us without reference to themselves. We need friends who are willing to break out of gravity-bound orbits and spin with us into the unknown.

And we need to become those friends ourselves.

The questions are always these: does this friendship lead you toward a fuller life or does it confine you? Does it bring you closer to your heart or take you further away? Does it open you or does it close you? Does it allow you to trust yourself further or does it make you frightened of yourself? Does it enlarge your life or does it make your life smaller?"

SONG: If I Wrote You by Dar Williams

BOOK: The Griffin & Sabine Trilogy Boxed Set: Griffin & Sabine/Sabine's Notebook/The Golden Mean by Nick Bantock

POEM: Postcards by Wendy Cope

At first I sent you a postcard

From every city I went to.

Grüsse aus Bath, aus Birmingham,

Aus Rotterdam, aus Tel Aviv.

Mit Liebe. Cards from you arrived

In English, with many commas.

Hope, you're fine and still alive,

Says one from Hong Kong. By that time

We weren't writing quite as often.

Now we're nearly nine years away

From the lake and the blue mountains,

And the room with the balcony,

But the heat and light of those days

Can reach this far from time to time.

Your latest was from Senegal,

Mine from Helsinki. I don't know

If we'll meet again. Be happy.

If you hear this, send a postcard.

QUOTE: "A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil; but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small, silly presents every so often - just to save it from drying out completely." ~ Pam Brown