My friend or my soul, which? I speak to you, but are you other than me? Oh, these last days, how I've missed you. Perhaps because I've not been running and so not giving you time to speak. Perhaps because you're old and sick. Perhaps you're on other business and will appear in due time.
Like the wife left at home to cultivate the kitchen garden and collect eggs, I wait your boisterous reappearance, the hullaballoo that attends you. Friendship considered by David Whyte in his Consolations is 'a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness.' Have you forgiven me for my tediousness; have I forgiven you for you unreliability? Yes, I have; come back and inspire me again, in any way, for however abbreviated a time.
'Through the eyes of a real friendship,' Whyte writes, 'an individual is larger than their everyday actions...' and it's this I value in our relationship. Your inspirations, enthusiasms, desires, prompts and urges to actually dare are what make me proud of myself, authentic, internally excited. This is livingness indeed.
In your absence, I turn my gaze and see only what is visible, put out my hands to make only what I need, un:cork my voice to satisfy only the most mundane of thirsts. 'When we flatten our personalities and lose our curiosity in the life of the world or of another, friendship loses spirit and animation...' It's you, my unsuppressed, incorrigible frolicker, that I want raising a ruckus, stamping and banging, in front of where my sensible self is dozing.
Poet Ghalib wrote: 'In this world of infinite possibility/I look around for the second step of desire--/All I see is one footprint!' I've placed morsels before you, and you've been briefly engaged but not asked for a second helping. I've notebooks of grand ideas which, feckless one, have ignored. Once you saw a butterfly and followed it around the sun, but now, listless, you loll. I'm tired of your limpness. Stand, glow, pursue. Be importunate. I can afford embarrassment, provided you are your best self and I, your best buddy.
'The ultimate touchstone is witness,' says Whyte, 'the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another...' So all my notebooks of illegible scribble are what I see of you and their careful dating and storage in shoe boxes is how you know me. I'm content to be Panza if you'll be Quixote. No I won't stop knocking on your door, urging you out as does Robert Herrick his Corinna: 'Come, let us goe, while we are in our prime:/And take the harmlesse follie of the time./We shall grow old apace, and die/Before we know our liberty...'. Just that.
Like the wife left at home to cultivate the kitchen garden and collect eggs, I wait your boisterous reappearance, the hullaballoo that attends you. Friendship considered by David Whyte in his Consolations is 'a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness.' Have you forgiven me for my tediousness; have I forgiven you for you unreliability? Yes, I have; come back and inspire me again, in any way, for however abbreviated a time.
'Through the eyes of a real friendship,' Whyte writes, 'an individual is larger than their everyday actions...' and it's this I value in our relationship. Your inspirations, enthusiasms, desires, prompts and urges to actually dare are what make me proud of myself, authentic, internally excited. This is livingness indeed.
In your absence, I turn my gaze and see only what is visible, put out my hands to make only what I need, un:cork my voice to satisfy only the most mundane of thirsts. 'When we flatten our personalities and lose our curiosity in the life of the world or of another, friendship loses spirit and animation...' It's you, my unsuppressed, incorrigible frolicker, that I want raising a ruckus, stamping and banging, in front of where my sensible self is dozing.
Poet Ghalib wrote: 'In this world of infinite possibility/I look around for the second step of desire--/All I see is one footprint!' I've placed morsels before you, and you've been briefly engaged but not asked for a second helping. I've notebooks of grand ideas which, feckless one, have ignored. Once you saw a butterfly and followed it around the sun, but now, listless, you loll. I'm tired of your limpness. Stand, glow, pursue. Be importunate. I can afford embarrassment, provided you are your best self and I, your best buddy.
'The ultimate touchstone is witness,' says Whyte, 'the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another...' So all my notebooks of illegible scribble are what I see of you and their careful dating and storage in shoe boxes is how you know me. I'm content to be Panza if you'll be Quixote. No I won't stop knocking on your door, urging you out as does Robert Herrick his Corinna: 'Come, let us goe, while we are in our prime:/And take the harmlesse follie of the time./We shall grow old apace, and die/Before we know our liberty...'. Just that.
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