Friends

Wandering blind but awakening in the fields of friendliness…

There is definitely a part in me that relishes a vision of the solitary cave yogi. A peaceful mountain quiet, fresh air and a diet of simple foods collected with sparing effort and for humble consumption, all in service to the friend of inner stillness.

Contemplating this imagery, I find a clear reflecting pool of joyful contentment and a certain fullness of being. I imagine a spring there and the gift of caretaking an endless flow of generosity and love for all beings.

I sense in this a connection to the essence of friendliness, a perfect insight of that divine manifest the Sufis call “the friend.”

This question of friendliness, friendship, and friends arose for me the other day when I sat down to a video call with a friend of mine whom I have never had the good fortune to meet with and connect person-to-person in the flesh and in the world.

This conversation of “Friendship” intersects so much of the world today. Otto Scharmer has called our attention to The Three Divides: from nature, from other, from self, for some time now. Instances of social polarization have been hot in the news, with wars internationally and broad political chasms within nations featuring prominently in the narrative. Meanwhile, innovative technology envisioned to bring us together seems instead to drive us further apart along Otto’s divides.

Personally, as a “disabled person” in a modern world designed for mobility, I enjoy a privileged insight of seeing so much of our common social context simply flowing by like landscape outside the window of a train… coasting clickety clack through the moments of life.

There are of course many contexts a person can find themselves within that can set one apart from the otherwise “ordinary” conventions of getting along, interacting, meeting, and making friends with one another. Physical disability can slow one down, easily enough so too can elements of a variety of socio-economic empowerment. Even simply the sense, accessible to almost anyone, of feeling lost in the systemic tides of the world can manifest as isolation and a dearth of friendship in one’s condition.

“The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction, however,
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.”

~ The Third Patriarch of Zen, Hsin Hsin Ming by Seng-T'san, Translated from the Chinese by Richard B. Clarke

But I digress, or perhaps jump ahead… Let me return.

I found my way to the aforementioned video call with this friend whom I know from a number of social contexts. Our paths intermingle regularly in conversations around Constructing Consciousness Collectives, meditations and dharma of the Mahamudra, Generating Transformative Change (in human systems), the American sociopolitical cocktail of the day, solidarity with friends under siege in the Ukraine, and a variety of other formal, informal, and semiformal circumstance.

Our original intent for the call (which we set many weeks ago) was to explore insights around how we (people) can show up to one another in a more generous and generative space of inquiry and listening. When finally we arrived, however, we found ourselves both so winded by the experience of life, elections, emotional intimate relational evolutions, and well-being across physical and many other dimensions, that we had neither one done the homework of remembering why we had meant to gather in the first place.

In a world so thoroughly penetrated with the busyness of crisis and demands of and quickening pace of daily life that seems to be headed for increasingly little good overall, it can be easy to feel like any little thing is just one more thing. The regular clockwork cycles of seasons, family evolution (births, graduations, marriages, deaths, etc.), the passing of the next round of holidays, work anniversaries or career milestones, risks losing the sacred qualities of measuring moments of a precious and fleeting life, instead becoming a routine march under darkening skies with ever greater storms on the horizon.

Friendliness it seems could be said to be a quality of the light. Something that flickers and dances reflecting off of our own feeling hearts and the faces and gestures of those that come before us. This is not merely a visual quality, but one with actual warmth, the vibratory aliveness that moves into the actions of love and support, making way for freedom, and encouraging that very vitality in “the other.”

I’m writing these words based on a very personal experience of isolation and separateness. The feelings of a world so caught in its own constructs that our living togetherness grinds and tumbles through windows of denatured time and social container. The promised patterns of our lives, rising out of poverty, finding ourselves fed, educated, credentialed and gainfully engaged, met with love and opportunities for family, “becoming an elder” has been replaced with “Retirement…”

These patterns of promise driving an evolutionary function that pollutes every drop of water, that imprisons and isolates countless billions, this promise that dangles a carrot of ever nearing technological salvation if only we will pay with one more drop of heart’s blood…

From an inner view, this is not the world I experience. Realizing my own heart, body, home, and friendships as arising in a boundlessly wide ocean of awareness, the world I experience is pulsing and radiant with a flourishing dynamic of love in every sparkling moment. Yet from the world of preferences where we meet in our karmic unfolding and confusions, there is a great distinction made and much work to be done to lift this place out of friendlessness and into the warmth of moving forward together.

The writing of this piece seems to me more elusive than I had imagined it might be. In seeking to describe a personal experience and reveal the way that looking reflects a certain wisdom and insight back into my eye, I find myself someplace slippery, a colorful living tapestry of multiple dimensions, a cartoon adventure of a childlike aimless wandering through fields of marvel.

Friend, friendship, friendliness, what concepts! From childlike simplicity to the divine fullness of being, these constructions of mind inform nearly any aspect of our experience. Are you a friend to the earth? Do you find your circle of friendship limited or vastly expansive? Is friendship fragile, easily broken, is it whole or part, when it is forgotten, does it, in the words of the poet, surprise you by poking his head around the corner and grinning?

Are there many versions of you living together in your skin? Are they friendly with one another? With those and the world around you? Is life itself friendly to you?

I am blessed with a handful of friendships that endure. I feel further blessed in that I feel a welcome friendliness with all souls and once discovered, I find those friendships always to hold a sacred place in the architecture of my heart where, it takes nothing more than a flicker of light to bring those gemstones down and celebrate them again in the space of togetherness.

At the same time, that playful vitality, that flourishing synergy that is the embodiment of the friendliness of all things, the free lovingness, that warmth of action lives itself within me and reaches, seeking always to meet itself more fully in the world. That place of distinction, this requires opportunity. These opportunities require the surface area of contact, connection, the warming emerging light of friendship embodied in two or more casting their light together into the world in loving service to that potent friendship waiting to shine back.

The video call with the friend I mentioned above landed on the tail end and in contrast to a number of spontaneous and, for me rare, momentary opportunities to find myself in long and free organic personal synergy with friends new and old. As I have inferred, many of my experiences of friendship these days pass through the course processes of brief and bounded, electron enabled, video or audio discourse contexts; spaces where drunken conviviality easily clashes with the perfunctory mandates of a productive meeting time.

I can imagine here the sensed opportunity to create or point to some novel organizational development process of “hosting living meetings” where participants follow a pathway to be both nourished by a sense of festivity and feast, and highly productive in moving forward the agenda of the day.

That feels to me like it would be a loss...

I think there is a much deeper movement of re-inhabiting that we are called to today. We have been on a truly incredible journey of recent centuries and possibly millennia, a journey up and out into abstractions, ideas, ideologies, nationstates and productive processes of constructing both material and social dynamics. Indeed this journey, incredible as it has been is finding itself increasingly at a loss for credential as its legacy wears further thin to the detriment of flourishing liveliness everywhere.

Enjoying some longer form unstructured engagements recently brought up the feeling of both "being seen," and more than that, feeling "actually nourished" by a subsequent appreciation riding on the back of that seeing. Experiencing these gifts, I noticed the contrast: the limited number of these occasions which I am privileged to enjoy. I noticed how the structure of my life, living alone in a city with "my community" of friends scattered to diverse geographies around the globe, with the various restrictions on my travel keeping me apart from these "casual" kinds of encounter and connection. I noticed these structural impositions to the opportunity of sharing in moments of creative emergence that binds one into the world at large, not just emotionally, but in a wider variety of economic dimension.

In practical terms, "I get by with a little help from my friends..." Thanks for this very simple reminder from the visionary John and Paul of our natural condition.

No thing lives or flourishes or even exists in isolation. While these conceptual distinctions allow us to forage, mate, admire, find inspiration, and explore evolutionary pathways of transformation, they are not True in any fundamental way. “We” are a part, an emergent momentary note in an immediate and transcendent symphony. Isolation, like beauty, lies wholly in the perception of the beholder.

Resident in the heart of our unique experience is this seed opportunity of friendliness. That we are each in every moment The Friend of that which arises before us and our only work is to pour open the heart of love, curiosity, appreciation, and care of and for that meeting with The Guest of our hosting awareness and experience.

I long to heal, to bring into wholeness, to open the countless opportunities of so many souls trapped in decaying structures of relating, to decompose these bindings of abstract shape and substance: the money and governance and warring identities.

The vitality is here, the flourishing lives in you and me.

These places in my life where I find obstruction, limitation, separation and isolation, these are the very teachers to whom I must listen most closely. These are the very constructs we must find our way into loving so carefully and so fully that they cannot help but to find themselves liberated into a new moment of freedom, liberation, and transformation in service to that subtle but very real ocean of love lying playfully and so often just out of sight and waiting every moment to poke its giggling smile around the corner and evoke the laughter and friendliness of your dear heart.