Credit: Carolyn Lake

Dear Sweet Listeners, We're just about to head off on vacation with our dearest couple friends whom we have known over the course of 35 years.  Three of us met in the “Living Love Community” back it in the late 70's, early 80's.  We lived together and were part of a teaching team based on the “Handbook to Higher Consciousness” by Ken Keyes. We all made bonds there which would last a lifetime.  What we had and still have in common is an avid interest in the spiritual path.  I met my husband a few years later and he had been a leader in the “Good Enough Community” out of Seattle.

Friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us 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. Through the eyes of a real friendship an individual is larger than their everyday actions, and through the eyes of another we receive a greater sense of a self we can aspire to, the one in whom they have most faith. Friendship is a moving frontier of understanding, not only of self and other but of a possible and as yet un-lived future.

Friendship is the great hidden transmuter of all relationships: 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 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 average existence.

Through the eyes of a friend, we especially learn to remain at least a little interesting to others. When we flatten our personalities and lose our sense of curiosity, friendship loses spirit and animation; boredom is the second great killer of friendship. Through the natural surprises of relationship, we recognize the greater surprising circles of which we are a part and eventually find a wider sense of revelation independent of human relationship: to learn to be friends with the earth and the sky, with the horizon and with the seasons, even with the disappearances of winter and in that faithfulness, eventually take the difficult path of becoming a good friend to our own going.

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 if 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 other nor of the self, 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.

Written in one sitting at my writing desk, looking out over the clear blue sea of the Puget Sound on an equally clear September morning. I had woken in the night, courtesy of just having returned from Europe, having dreamed a long conversation with a dead friend; we were laughing and joking, poking fun at one another’s faults and foibles while enjoying our entrance, traveling in the back of a Limo, across a magnificent bridge into a great city. The physical essence of the dream was exactly the same essence I had felt with him while he had been alive and yet the dream felt as if it also marked a new stage in our relationship. In the dream I felt fully alive, privileged, blessed by friendship, up to our usual mischief and sure we would find it all surprising, insightful and hilarious, with good food and drink, conversation and conviviality along the way.

Credit: Carolyn Lake

Dear Sweet Listeners, I remember my first coach, Isabel Parlett of Sound Bite Shaman, taught me that it's just as important which clients or experiences I say “no” to as those to whom I say “yes.” A client who is not a true match for me can take up 3 –5 times more time than a client who makes me feel like dancing when they phone in. If it's not the right match, an internal struggle ensues when I work with them. Letting them go in an honorable way, makes space in me and in my practice. The client is free to find their own best match.

Good times to say No:

When saying NO protects your essential values.

When you want to protect yourself from others use or abuse.

When you need the power of saying NO to change direction.

When you know that saying YES will carve a little slice out of you.

Nature as a Primary Resource Banff, British Columbia, Canada

Dear Sweet Readers, Today was one of those days. You know the kind of day when you don't want to get out of bed, feel bummed, don't even know why. It's the kind of day that began with that old visitor, depression. It's gloomy both outside and inside in Santa Fe today. This is Saturday so it's my writing day and I was thinking, “I'm too bummed to write.” Then I thought since I promised to keep this blog “real” and to show up as my authentic self, maybe I could be present with this depression and with you, my reader. I might also consider sharing a resource called “The Internal Board of Directors” that might offer comfort and support to you.

"Every moment of depression is an opportunity to deepen your self compassion. Self soothing is the key today.”

Credit: Carolyn Lake

NOTE: This is Part II in a series on The Dark Night of the Soul. Dear Ones, Whenever I've been in any kind of intense emotional or physical pain, I begin, after a time, to ask the questions, “Why me?”. “What did I do wrong?”, “Where the hell is God?”, “What is the meaning of suffering and why has it landed on my doorstep?”. I KNOW these are common questions for all of us when we experience great difficulty. There have been a few occasions in my life when pain has been so intense, that I've shouted out, “If you weren't already dead, I'd kill you God!...”

In Impossible Darkness

Do you know how the caterpillar turns?
Do you remember what happens inside a cocoon?
You liquefy.

There in the thick black of your self spun womb
Void as the moon before waxing

You melt
(as Christ did for three days in the tomb)

conceiving
in impossible darkness
the sheer inevitability of wings.