On the second day of a friend staying he makes tea, and delivers it to me in my favourite cup. How did he know? I consider how he must have observed this choice of mine: the fine-lipped edge and its pleasing design – the only one of its kind. I am a little bit taken aback both by the effete pleasure it brings me to use such a gorgeous object, and the embarrassment of being observed in my particularity, and his attention to me. Especially as he is a burly farmer who could so easily hurl me from one end of the room to another.
And then, from this interior vantage point of the imagined difference, a realisation grows: that his seeing into me involves his own self-knowledge. Because, surely only a person conscious of their own particularities would notice them so keenly in another? In this way an interior knowledge is exchanged between us without so much as a word.
Out of such differences are friendships grown.
Sometimes in our dreams we find ourselves in a locked room, facing a threshold we haven’t yet crossed. This might be interpreted as an unexplored part of ourselves, an alarming, possibly even frightening aspect that’s hidden from us. And yet it casts its shadow into other aspects. Something not known, not even a memory, simply an uncanny sense, an inkling.
Sometimes our lives are like this. The sense of another room, maybe? A wild light and shadowed garden that we’ve never inhabited? A life not quite lived out in all its four corners, a life that hasn’t extended fully into the ten directions.
And yet around us, always, we have an extraordinary collection of people who, if we allow ourselves to be met in friendship, might help us to cast the light within. The possibility of a door to open into some unvisited room. A guide, a herald, a bodhisattva, a presence not encompassed by linear time. A light that reaches back across all that has befallen us. A glimpse of the unconscious. The heart broken and opened into the dark light of further space. Friendship that shows us there is a threshold to be crossed.
And now, stirring coffee in the mocha pot, your little gift to me, I relish the memory of you here. Casting the light within, all my stubborn, unwanted qualities seen with such tenderness.