This is the second of two guest posts by . It’s been a joy to have one of my life-long friends sharing on this page whilst I’ve been gone, and an added joy to read of our deep friendship in her words today. I’ll be back sah
Thank you, Ruth.
I am moving through the woods that my friend visits. On the same paths, by the same trees and mosses and ferns that she brushes past. It is a cold and foggy morning in January and I am walking her dog and cooing phrases of encouragement to her - “good girl”, “you’re the best girl”, “walk on now”. I am breathing in the forest air, considering what I’ll write about on this week’s Substack post. In truth I don’t know if I have anything of value to say, I am so often at a loss for words these days, or a belief in their power and importance, and I’m sensing the freeze response that often creeps up on me when there is a deadline looming.
I feel Layla’s hand on my back, a gentle nudge of direction, perhaps a calling, an invitation to “walk on now”. Our 25 years of friendship from the first day in college appears like a timeline in my peripheral vision and I savour the journey that has brought us here, from that initial spark of soul recognition through all of the peaks and troughs of life and living.
I consider the friendships I hold dear, some lifelong, others newly forged and many that have rekindled over time. I love where we are now, with a new clarity of seeing and a greater capacity for holding one another in our fullness, our complexities, our flaws and our fierceness.
I come to a clearing high up on a rocky outcrop. The fog is burning off and the waters of Dublin bay glimmer in the distance. There’s a bench with some poetry etched on it and opposite that a plaque in the rock that says “it’s good to be alive and here”.
Something in my heart stings as I read this and warm tears gather in my eyes. I breathe, deeply to find my footing. It’s like the breath comes from the forest floor up through my body and opens up tiny spaces in me for those words to find a home. In so many ways it is good to be alive and it is good to be here, and truly for me it is the enduring and deepening friendships in my life that are making it so.
I turn to read the words of Seamus Heaney on the bench before I sit. He speaks of “relearning the acoustic of frost”. So I find my seat and close my eyes to sharpen my listening, to attune to what the acoustic of frost might be. As the dogs settle and my heart rate does too, I get to listen. To listen not just by hearing, but to listen with my whole body on this crisp Winter’s morning, supported by a chair, in a forest, on a rocky hill, encouraged by the words of a dead poet I listen for the acoustic of frost
Acoustic as a pure state resounding, without amplification or artifice, without interference to the naturally occurring essence or quality of a thing. As my senses sharpen I begin to imagine what the acoustic of friendship might sound like, might feel like.
The way my heart sings like sympathetic strings in the company of a friend who just ‘gets me’.
The ease in my nervous system when there is nothing to hide and nothing in the ether to figure out, decipher or decode.
The relief when competitiveness burns away like morning fog and we are left with an expansive and clear concord of sky where we both get to take up space.
The generative quality of friendship that is life giving.
As just as there is the light and comfort of friendship there is also the shadow and another section of this poem from Heaney leads me to consider how true friendship is called to accommodate the process of rupture and repair in times of great reckoning.
“that was a time when the times
were also in spasm -
the ties and the knots running through us
split open”
First Flight – Seamus Heaney
Where the edges of our belonging to one another might fray or tug in times of challenge, the words of David Whyte and his musings on friendship have been helpful to me. I have returned many times in the past few years to his writing on friendship in an attempt to understand my part in that process of rupture and repair.
“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 that 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.”
And it is this very reason that I cherish all the friendships that have sustained me in my life, the ones that have meant enough to me and another - on our little island of belonging - for us to be real and raw and forgiving of one another over and over again. This kind of consistency and true mirrored resonance means more than ever in our deeply fractured world.
I’ve been reading Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein in preparation for an online study group with intersectional feminist coach and activist Keri Jarvis.
Indeed I have been leading a kind of ‘doubled’ existence these past couple of weeks; along with being a grateful guest writer here on Layla’s Beauty & Bone, I’ve also been sleeping in her bed, eating from her bowls, drinking her tea, cuddling her cats and walking her dog. More Goldilocks scenario than doppleganger I admit, it is in fact just a straight up legit house-sit by a trusted friend, but I have enjoyed the momentary echoing between stepping into another’s shoes, ‘playing house’ and the twists and turns of my reading material. It has stirred these thoughts on the mirror world of how we reflect with others and what we see back of ourselves through their lens. It has brought me on tangents of thought around relational reciprocity, the role of friendship as a guide rail in challenging times, how we are forever resonating, forgiving, understanding, calling out the best in us and calling in more intimacy and truth both of ourselves and of the other, and especially how these personal connections all play out on the larger stage of world events and social change.
Although Klein’s Doppleganger begins with her being mistaken for author Naomi Wolf and her attempts to disentangle from the mismatch it becomes more about how she investigates the societal “strangeness so many of us have been trying to name – everything so familiar, and yet more than a little off. Uncanny people, upside-down politics, even, as artificial intelligence accelerates, a growing difficulty discerning who and what is real.”
It has been comforting to read her insights, her investigative rigour and what feels like research backed reasons to be hopeful. “Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered” she says, and her words are like breadcrumbs on the forest path, putting some shape on things. Although none of us can be sure where it’s all leading, I know I feel less aimless and more focused in the company of her words, like that sage friend with her hand on my back she says “the point of this mapping is not to stay trapped inside the house of mirrors, but to do what I sense many of us long to do: escape its mind-bending confines and find our way toward some kind of collective power and purpose. The point is to make our way out of this collective vertigo, and get somewhere distinctly better, together”
And it is that relational quality of working towards a “distinctly better” place together I have been looking deeper into these meditations, definitions and musings on friendship by some of my favourite writers as well as having conversations with trusted friends about what our friendship means at this point in our lives and at this time in the world.
I imagine all of our relationships are being asked similar questions - how truly honest are we willing to be with one another, as the world implodes, explodes, shows us its scars, as we are being constantly called to act from a place of heart led engagement and facing up to the realities of our collective survival, and what friendship and community means within all of that.
This Nollaig na mBan I visited Tobar na Tríonóide in County Wicklow with two dear college friends, their daughters and my husband. A cheerful posse off on our adventures, walking and talking on country roads as we picked up litter from the hedgerows and laughed at knock-knock jokes. We cleared sticks and dead leaves from the water, lifted an ivy tree that was covering one of the three streams that spring from the well. We tied strands of colourful wool on the wishing tree, lit candles and placed flowers at the altar, watched a sprightly robin claim his patch, announcing himself with a medley of chirps and pronounced plumage. We played whistle tunes and sang songs to return the compliment. The acoustic of friendship resounding with holy water, flowing freely with ancestry, authenticity and acts of service.
“My friends are my estate” wrote Emily Dickenson, and I must agree. The richness I feel in these moments are beyond anything else I touch with professional success or monetary currency. I feel most secure and most alive in these shared experiences that cost absolutely nothing. I would prefer to build a legacy of loving hearts around me than a domain of material wealth.
In her book ‘The Friendship of Women’ Joan Chittister writes “friends are in other words, the only wealth I have at the end. My friends will be the treasure I accrue in life and a measure, perhaps of my own worth as well.”
So to conclude this ramble through the mirrored corridors of my constantly curious and sometimes fractured and seeking mind – with friendship as a life-raft in turbulent seas, as a mirror of self, as an island of belonging, an estate of life’s wealth, as a generative force and generous acoustic in my days, I am able to say with resounding voice “it’s good to be alive and here”.
Buíochas ó chroí Layla
for your invitation and warm welcome to share on Beauty & Bone.
Grá & meas mór go deo.
Ruth
Thank you - what a beautiful post! 💖
You are such a beautiful writer !