My Lesson for a Missed Friend

This morning I started to take down the Holiday Tree (we confess to being spiritually eclectic Jewish Americans with an interfaith partnership and intergenerational household) which brought into hindsight this three week period of bad Northeast weather, cabin fever amongst the already mentioned inter-faith and generational hoard, the company of additional loved ones, a fever-threatening strep outbreak which resulted in a failure to launch them back to school, and recognition, of how much I missed my friends who moved to Tucson and weren't part of the prodigal loved ones who came to us upon a midnight dreary.

While the holiday season comes about like clockwork it still seems to be for me, at least, a time that I always get knocked off my personal center. The increased amount of bodies I have to vie with for space and for longer periods of time, the constant sounds of someone else's voice and activity, the failure of the Networks to put on even one new episode to rivet my ass to the blissful experience of non presence, really screws up my "om" moments that might leave me better prepared for managing the increase in stress. This year while attempting to read Rabbi Rami Shapiro's The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness Preparing to Practice, which is an excellent book by the way, I can't begin to tell you the foul thoughts I had with each demanding whine for more time on the Wii.

But there is more to this post than just my own complaining and whining. I miss my friend of 30 years and not because we are lousy telephone buddies. The telephone just couldn't make it anyway. When she lived close by we would have these intense, wonderful and rich psycho-spiritual conversations for hours and I really do miss it. But that is not what I most miss most. I miss the times we sat in silence in each other's company before, during and after one of these discussions. A friend of mine named Francis, who was a true scholar and researcher said that she felt the preciousness of her relationship with her partner, in the act of "simply being able to work in her presence". To deeply know this is so different than pounding away in a gray cubical next to the person you are going to go to have lunch with at noon. It is, in fact, knowing you are truly and uniquely blessed. I know our friendship is a deep blessing and as I sit in silence pondering that thought, I fall into the preciousness of that intimacy and the eternal presence of friendship; a lesson well remembered for a missed friend.