Honest Friends

From The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.

Nothing among human things
has such power to keep our gaze
fixed ever more intensely upon God
than friendship.
-Simone Weil

Honest friends are doorways to our souls, and loving friends are the grasses that soften the world.

I have few people in my life that I would call 'honest' friends. These are people that I have been close to even when we haven't seen each other for a long long time. We can bump into each other, speak to each other on the phone and it's like we haven't been apart at all.

These are people with whom I could, if I were a brave soul, share all that is going on in my life, and they would listen with an open heart, and I know they wouldn't judge me.

Being not the brave soul, there is only really one of my honest friends that I open up with in that respect. Yes I know it's a cliche that the one you love is your truest friend, your best friend. But it also happens to be true in this case. Mir, I love you.

I know they won't let me get away with bullshit either, which is sometimes a source of endless frustration. The child inside that is having a tantrum, for instance, and just wants to be humoured - and we all have one don't we, whether or not we're honest enough to acknowledge them or not - hates when my honest and true friends call me on it. It might be what I need at the time, but it's not what I want.

At times it feels that they're being hypercritical, but I know that's not true and is just a reflection of that inner child rising up in petulant protest against not being coddled. Times like that I have to take a breath, take a step back and look and feel with adult eyes and an adult heart... and times like that I hope that I am able to be the same kind of honest friend to others as they are to me.

An Open Heart

From The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.

The flower doesn't dream of the bee.
It blossoms and the bee comes.

If I have learned anything through the years, it is that, though we discover and experience joy with others, our capacity for joy is carried like... nectar in our very own breast.

As such, we can only taste of it's sweetness when it is shared by the opening of our own hearts to others. I get the whole... needing to be yourself, and able to be for yourself and do for yourself and be independent within a relationship and all that... but honestly, there is a time for surrender too... and I think it's when we don't heed those times of surrender, the necessary opening of our hearts that we lose something of ourself, and of the joy in the experience of love.

Over the weekend I went to Megan's wedding - which was a wonderful joy, btw, and a perfect example of love and open hearts - and afterwards listened to a family member describe something that happened recently in her daughter's life, and the advice she'd given to the young beau, and while a part of me understood the advice (not to coddle and smother and do everything for her), another large part of me was sad. Why do we (universal we there, we as human beings) have to force open each others hearts in absenting ourselves?

The whole 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' kind of thing. Never liked that... don't think I ever will.