Intovert friendship from the Marginalian

 

An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of the Art of Connection

Marginalian editor, Maria Popova, says this:

You can glean a great deal about a person from the constellation of friends around the gravitational pull of their personhood. “Whatever our degree of friends may be, we come more under their influence than we are aware,” the trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell observed as she contemplated how we co-create each other and recreate ourselves in friendship. Her friend Ralph Waldo Emerson — whom she taught to look through a telescope — believed that all true friendship rests on two pillars. In his own life, he put the theory into practice in his friendship with his young protégé Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) — a solitary and achingly introverted person himself, who thought deeply and passionately about the rewards and challenges of friendship

She quotes Thoreau:

The field where friends have met is consecrated forever. Man seeks friendship out of the desire to realize a home here… The friend is like wax in the rays that fall from our own hearts. My friend does not take my word for anything, but he takes me. He trusts me as I trust myself. We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.

llustration by Maurice Sendak from a vintage ode to friendship by Janice May Udry

For me, in this time of my life, I have some really nice aquaintences, and a few deep friends. They all accept that I'm not a party gal any more! I like the image I learned from some internet or another saying "You are the average of 5 of your friends." I think of my friends, and feel just what that might mean to me.

BR

Look deep within - another? Myself?

The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them  
Elizabeth Gilbert

I guess I spend much more time being introspective than I do looking into the depths of others.
(Blogger is giving me the exercise to rewrite the whole blog if I want it to be legible...it is posting everything in smallest type face...and won't let me change it.) To continue...

But I think I'm missing a lot that way. So for the next 24 hours I am going to ask others questions about themselvces.  I am going to spend more time focused upon others than myself.
That may not come naturally to me.  I had admitted to being an introvert, to enjoying my own company.  I get my energy from my alone time, when reading, writing, looking things up for various research projects, being in nature...and don't put that much of my energy into getting into the depths of my friends (though I have had some great conversations at times.)
So be warned, fellow people sharing space in my neck of the woods. I'm coming to find the jewels that you have hidden deep within you.
Do you want me to? See, my first thought is, how invasive that would be.
But perhaps I can do it with a spirit of exploration that will benefit us both.
What do you think?
If you are reading this, please reply about yourself, just a glimpse that will let me know something of that worth that I am willing to search out.  What I imagine you're thinking is, whow this is very private! How dare that person that I barely am acuainted with ask such a thing?
Well, that's my introverted persona thinking that.  If you think differently, perhaps you would share that, say, you love Jeopardy. Or perhaps you might want to focus on your love of nature.
I sometimes have really nice comments here on blogger, saying that you have similar interests, or find answers to similar quests.  
I feel very much like a "Sheldon on Big Bang Theory."











How does your life work?

What's of most value to you?

Thanks for at least reading so far.  And think about what you might answer...

So long, Jinni

May her journey to the summerland be easy, and may her friends and family know peace. 

Last night, not having stayed awake till midnight, I had some emotions churning away that prodded me awake around 2:30 am.  (It could have been the delicious but high fat dinner as well.)

Anyway, I couldn't sleep, and decided to write (journal, not publishable) what was going on.  And eventually I saw what years of therapy would show me.  Would I remember it this time?  I hope so.

(And the heading of DON"T POST THIS didn't work, so it was actually out there, my totally bare psyche for about 20 minutes this morning.  I will not try journalling in that way EVER again.)

After my journaling, I checked my emails, and there was "bad news."
That subject line, especially from the husband of an old friend, made me take a deep breath before opening the email.

She was failing and not expected to live through the night.

Jinni on the left while a teen in 1957

Oh no.  I thought how she had just gotten back in touch on emails, after a month or so of silence.  During that month I knew she and her husband had been moving to get the treatment that they both needed for medical care.  And I knew she wasn't happy about it, since this is a very strong, independent woman.

So I answered Jim's email, saying that if he got a chance to talk with her in her coma, I'd appreciate his giving her my personal message.  I knew he was having a tough time.

I posted my sadness on FaceBook, but since I'd just posted my wishes for a Happy 2014 including a picture, the sad message disappeared from NewsFeed almost immediately.  It doesn't matter.  I will talk with my good friends soon and experience my grief in person.

Then I lay down in bed...suddenly unable to get warm.  I couldn't sleep.  I couldn't cry.  So I thought of communicating through the other ether, the web of the spiritual connection that we all know of, but seldom try using. I started singing the chant that Jinni and others had sung back in the days when we gathered in circles as women, as pagans.

I sang and sang and sang...the cats immediately came to my side and gave their homage to this goddess woman.  Hours later, and a few tears as well, I turned off the light.

When I woke during the night, it was again tossing and turning, not being able to accept and let go of my friend.  I imagined a version of Pagan heaven, with great images of all the young people having a good time (and I won't give you details, because if you're Pagan you already know them, and if you're not, you have your own images to put there in front of you.)  Everyone had gone back to the prime of their lives, rather than the old or infirm physical states that they left their bodies in.

I thought at one point of how I've been emailing Jinni for the last 13 years, as well as another friend who I knew from the same time in school (high school and early college years).  I thought I could consolidate all her emails and send them to her husband.  Then I remembered that her emotions sometimes weren't that positive towards him...and I wanted to respect that.  But there are plenty of other emails that I could gather together.  What a job that would be.

The things that I remember from those emails were her great stories about her life...and her father who died in WW II.  Jinni could spin a yarn in an excellent way, touching the fiber of your being.  She also had an alter ego of Motorcycle Mama that let loose her wild side.

She spoke of having belonged to circles of like-minded ritual followers.  She spoke of friends she had lost.  And she shared a CD of goddess chants with me.  I'll be digging that out and playing it today when I cast a Tarot spread in her honor, and meditate as I let go, as I see her true being, and send love to her family.