“You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.” 

    – Frederick Buechner

  November 30, 2008 – I have a close friend I’ve never seen, but who understands me and is teaching me how to cook. I have another friend I’ve never met who has shaped my photography, and critiqued every photo I’ve taken. I have a close  friend I met more than 30 years ago, but have not seen or talked with until recently, and is teaching me valuable lessons about life. And another whose religious and cultural beliefs are very different from mine but who is a powerful and supportive influence in my life. I have a friend who is emerging as an artist and another who is struggling to publish a novel.
  All of these relationships are challenging in different ways. I suppose because I am a difficult friend to have in many ways. I tend to back away from people, and keep them at a distance, something I am getting past.
  Friends, I think, are teachers. Each one helps me to grow and learn and feel safe. Each one sees me as well or better than I see myself. Each one sees past my narrow view of myself and my many flaws and thus inspires me to try and be the person they see, rather than the person I sometimes see.
 Friendship is about trust. At some point, you have to say, I have a friend who cares about me, a person I can depend on. Depending on people can be frightening, and sometimes disappointing. It can be magical and uplifting as well. I always expect my friends to say, we’ve had enough of your and your foolish struggles with life. Some have.
  I have always had difficult making and keeping friends, not because we fight – I hate to fight – but because I find the very idea of friendship unnerving and unreliable.
  My friends don’t really care that much what I fear or feel about friendship. I have discovered that they are my friends, period, and they accept and encourage me, and they have faith in me.
    So this week I’m going to be writing more specifically about friendship, and the notion that friendship, like love and all strong relationships, comes when you are open to it. I think in general it is more complicated to be a woman than a man, but when it comes to friendship, it is harder to be male, I think. Men often are uncomfortable in this realm of emotion, confiding, and taking time to do the hard, grunt work that often comes in building and maintaining a friendship. There is not a friendship in my life that does not require work, maintenance and thought. And I remind myself every day to do it.
  You can put as many miles as you would like between yourself and a real friend, but I think it is so that you begin, after time, to carry them in your heart and head, the world that lives in you.