Friendships

I look to friends like they could be closer,
For I know little of what it is to be closer.
Divisions, however, are all I've known.

We are crops competing,
Weeds that are choking.
Are we actually fully grown?

I believe the apparent progression to perfect, though never perfect, is something which we oft find troubling, and allow regressing.  For friendships particularly I have felt this, recently coming to recognize it when I had been most detached from its emotional and intuitive pressures.  These pressures have arisen from certain things which either I found troubling in my interactions towards others, as well as their interactions towards me.  Interactions include the understandings explicit and implicit in their or my language, and other ways of expression, like actions, in what they or I do.  I take a large responsibility for how I express myself, because I hold myself to peaceful and genuinely beneficent motives that seek to reasonably translate these very motives from my mind to the world, so I will often not settle my movement towards a common understanding if I have made mediocre discourse, or if my actions are misinterpreted.  This holds true for how one engages with me, insofar as I will see negative expressions as an indication of my failures, indeed, but ever the more enthusiastic they make me, because it gives me a new duty towards self-improvement and understanding.  Movement towards those ends begins upon awareness of such criticism.  The enthusiasm I receive from critique is synonymous to the pleasures a committed athlete or performer has when they work at length and/or intensity on a specific thing or set of things which others had illustrated they were lacking grace in.  Additionally, when such an achievement of spiritual growth is made, your confidence in discourse is all the stronger, your faith in friends flowers.

Faith becomes important in context to the rarity and difficulties of friendship.  Friendship in society is rare past the virtue of having shared goals and spaces, but can be recognized as potential in many places.  For as I mentioned, it is a failure on either side to not open to a friend, even to a potential friend.  This combined with the real possibility to form characteristically unlikely, unconventional friends.  They may not be driven to all physical commitment, nor may you, but to treat them like a gentle creature of affection, one which can only give so much attention in reciprocation to you, we grow ourselves.  Anything which is resultant from their affections towards us is delightful and may expand our creative awareness for good ways and feelings outwards (and inwards!) still.  (This particular set of understanding of mine is largely credited to R.W. Emerson's own essay "Friendship")

However this unrequited love spreads, friendship seems to have more apparently (though it seems duly apparent above to me) pragmatic components as well, which keep our lives' work satisfied and concordant with those friendships which compliment our deepest individual passions.  It first and foremost motivates us often from state of complacency relative to prosperous souls around us, into a mysterious, spontaneous realm of curious possibility.  Think to the bold and wandering feelings with friends, liberty and time to do things unconcerned with the crude judgement of advisers!  From the perseverance of these adventures, we do indeed swiftly pace our passions akin to eternal star-dance - acting, burning like they will never cease.  But we see too often they do come down to ashes and stardust...

Friendships which can last past the periods of waxing and waning furies of passions contain seeking, yet satisfaction, between the friends or between them and the world.  To build upon its pragmatic complexities, these friends are not limited to, and not quite necessitating, but might need sharing of the followong: of criticisms, of goals, of enjoyed or uncontrolled practices, of feelings, of emotions, of ideas, of creations.  These things may become quenched or seem boring at times, but there is always a facet of Nature to bring people together if each looks closely enough!

I hope to my friends, family, and to strangers as well, that we can see this shared Nature and Mind within and without, for there is such grand possibility with open arms and hands held high.

I also encourage all into looking past the physical components of friendship and understand the componenets of the Minda for an easeful translation from a compassionate awareness of humans as potential friends, to a similar awareness towards pragmatic approaches in our lives to opportunities and difficulties too.

A note:  Passions is actually a word coming from Aristotle and the Greeks essentially meaning "suffering", and so we often use it in a positive context, and even with such a concept as compassion, but I believe it should be understood more as an overpowering feeling, often uncontrollable but to different degrees, good or bad.

Your Friend,
Grant