Posted on 07/12/2016 8:03:24 AM PDT by BenLurkin
flower and song? (it’s not plural is it?)
It’s one or the other..
Singular. It’s the title of a widely-used Spanish hymnal.
If you stood at the very center of the North Pole, and faced the sun, you’d have morning on your right hand, and evening on your left hand.
This should probably be done as a mental exercise only.
Well, if the algoreians are correct, I’d need a boat...
...is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us to see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn.
A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.
In the course of the years a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves, to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.
Friendship is the great hidden transmuter of all relationship: it can transform a troubled marriage, make honorable a professional rivalry, make sense of heartbreak and unrequited love and become the newly discovered ground for a mature parent-child relationship.
The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most ordinary existence…
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.
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 self nor of the other, 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.
...
From ‘FRIENDSHIP’ in
CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment
and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
© David Whyte & Many Rivers Press
Thanks for bein’ there all this time, Friends.
.
^5
“And that was this Morning’s Pause for thought with HK, Here on Radio FRee Republic.” (Apologies to BBC Radio 2.)
Written communication is probably the hardest form of communication imaginable when it comes to remaining friends or even civil with each other.
You cannot See the other persons Eyes or tone as they speak.
Each sentence has to be taken a face value. To hang together for best part of fifteen years the way this group has ,is a real achievement.
It is really something to be able to post here.
Good morning, Hk. Nice post!
That, my dear HK, is the essense of the UT. We are privileged to count you among the Denizens of the Habitats. (As opposed the *ahem* Lower Levels.)
Thanks for being here!
Very poignant, Bob, thanks,
I’ve sat here looking at that kitteh for 15 minutes, or so, and I finally figured out what is so striking about it: It is pie-eyed. My goodness. What a beauty!
Laundry day again. (She sighs.) And I’m tired going into it. At least today, I don’t have to stay up there for two hours like I would if I were doing sheets and towels.
And in other news, I actually felt a key with my little fingertip as I was typing! YAY!
The kitten was rescued from the street in Bombay, India.
Good morning! DP gave me Windows 10 yesterday, and now I have to refigure out everything. Why can’t I just have my same old stuff always work?
Today’s first activity is Frank and Kathleen’s swimming lessons. After that, we’ll see. Sally and Pat need to find the things they’ll need for camp next week. People always say, “We don’t have (whatever),” when what they mean is they can’t be bothered to look until they find it!
Do you ever pick up, say, the cardboard torn off a package of batteries, to find that it’s covered with arcane calculations involving Pi? It was suspiciously near the microwave oven, too.
If I stop posting, assume that Pat got us through the wormhole back to his home planet.
The packet is empty....
It could be proof that the maths has worked and the batteries are now on their way home! :)
Also, he might have eaten the batteries. We’ve never been certain of Pat’s power source.
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