On Friendship

Friends drift in and out of my life.  I drift in and out of theirs.  We know where to find each other.  And that is good.  

I have learned-- really really learned this year-- something about being.  I have mitigated the harshness of my inner critic.  I have turned down the volume of the incessant reviews in my brain.  Yes, I have learned a new way of being.  

There's something about respect.  Something about believing in the possibilities that is each of us.  Something about allowing others to have their own journeys just as I have mine.  We are all different, but not so different that we cannot recognize ourselves in others and others in ourselves.

And yet, there is something else there.  Something that fiercely informs me that I will no longer be taken advantage of, that I am not a sheeple, that I protest.  Anger has become my truest friend.  Not my only friend, as a few people have mistakenly thought.  My truest friend.

I have been lonely too.  Not so lonely that my socks talk to each other in public.  But lonely enough.  I have felt the vastness of the universe.  We are each of us alone in our own skins.

I am a tiny speck among other tiny specks.  A bunch of specks can form a dirt pile.  It takes one person to start a revolution.  One person and a friend to gain momentum.  When you kick our dirt pile, we reform.  We are a mass of dirt piles.  We stir up and clink to your leather shoes and your lilly-white garments.  We interrogate authority.  We agitate for change.  We clog your vacuum cleaner when you try to suck us up.

There's something to be said for solidarity within the protest lines.  There's something deep about a bunch of dirt clumping together.  We form a network which plants ideas and dreams.  We know how to live.

sapphoq n friends