Although I am sure- being so blessed as I am- that I grow blase about multitudes of my blessings, there are some that my eyes seem to stay wide open to. Two of them are the natural beauty of God's creation and the heart-rending beauty of good friendships woven together by a mutual love of our Father. Friendship- phileo love- is a blessing I hope none that I love ever miss; and as far as it depends upon me, everyone in my family- parents, siblings, husband, children,and grandchildren- will get some of that treasured kind of liking from me in addition to my loving.
One of my favorite places on earth is Hawaii, and for the last five years, my four trips to visit Candy have sweetly commingled these two favorites of mine: God's palette of nature and His gift of delightful friendship.
Through open windows in Hawaii exclamation beckons- a chirping of overflowing life from streamlined, pointy-angled birds investigating green mangoes or papayas clustered in a cornucopia of voluptuous clumps. But if, when you look, it's not the birds, it's likely the ventriloquism of exotic geckoes whose voices cast giant fuchsia shadows to make up for their pale coyness of the flesh. Why are they so loud to the ear, as if to beg me to know them, while so quiet to the eye? (What do they fear we will find lacking in them?)
Life can't contain itself here. Everything aside from the visual presence of geckoes is elevated, magnified, amplified, multiplied, heaped up like rubies and emeralds in a cartoon-pirate's treasure chest. In some other setting, the abundant variety of color and texture would be gaudy like a lady gone blind, or maybe just pretending to have so that she could throw all caution to the wind and parade around town in green and yellow striped stretch-pants and a purple floral hat with orange silk tassels. And all these things, as though their vibrancy weren't enough, bear taste and/or fragrance! Its tantalizing energy grabs you without your effort.
It's a lazy, undisciplined kind of attraction that happens here. It requires none of the nobility of making allowances for weakness or the mercy of sifting through the hard edges of blemished flesh to find the pristine soul within. No, none of that; it is all just out there. Even a small-minded buffoon can find it and, with no effort whatsoever, can have it to put in his grimy, undeserving pocket! An overly-eager dog ever at his master's feet, it's the pearl-on-the-outside-of the oyster kind of beauty, unlike, say, the desert of West Texas that must grow and grow and grow on you always taking the costly gamble that your life won't last long enough to get you there. Here in Hawaii, you're already there. It takes nothing. All you have to do is be here. Just go outside, or sit in any house with open windows- which is all of them- and you are smack-dab in the middle of it. No gleaning is required.
Now I move from the voice of the gecko to the voice of good friendship. It is both more and less than I thought it was. And maybe more and less are not the right words, but some old scales are falling from my eyes, and like all scales that fall from eyes, I never knew they were there. Oh, I haven't changed my mind about how fine it is to the touch. It is still a satin pillowcase, powdered sugar, a cello's voice on a summer evening- fine and rich and soothing- calling me out of where I wish to leave into where I long to nest. It reaches ever so deep to scratch unfathomable, itchy regions. In this respect it can feel almost like the oxygen that we draw in mindlessly yet crucially. We are going along blithely through our lives doing it, breathing, and owning it, friendship, and then we lose our regulator forty-feet beneath the surface, or we move away or be moved away from, and we realize the vast worth of the thing. Gray has turned silver, pink has stretched into red, yellow has grown golden, nevermore to return to its paleness. It's the way danger which has always been foreign finally becomes real once we feel its hot breath on our necks. It jells into something solid. I'm thinking that most of the people I know are still in the liquid stage, waiting but not knowing they are waiting. Many die that way. It probably doesn't hurt. It's just a jewel they never mined. But once it jells and you understand that it is real and solid and indispensable, a lot like oxygen, well, you never can take it for granted again. You have learned something you can't unlearn. Hopefully, this is a blessing, but whether it is or not, this is the case.
So, yes, I have known all about the value of this deep-throated, velvet voice of friendship-love, and I haven't changed my mind. The thing I am seeing with a better focus than before is another facet of friendship that some might interpret as less, or at least shallower, than the oxygen aspect of friendship. Some might even say that this thing can happen just as well between two random hobos on a boxcar riding only from here to the city limits of the next town as it could between someone you would go so far as to call a friend. And here it is: Friendship's song is sometimes sung to us in the simple melody of noticing... A pretty perfume on your neck, the luxurious new sheets on your bed, the way you spoke so gently to the checker at the grocery store. Sometimes friendship is at its best when we simply lend generously the rare eye of appreciation. Of course appreciation for the good things you have done for me, but not just that. For your taste, for your uniqueness, for your God-given creativity that makes you different from her, and her, and him and me. For a tastefully-chosen well-cultivated flower by your front door, the nuances of flavor produced by just the right spices, the ingenious, harmonious placement of the pictures in your bathroom, for the aptly-spoken word, like "apples of gold in settings of silver," the perfectly curved cupping of a hand on the cheek, for a shared song, a book, or a movie that haunts your heart, for the magic glance speaking secret recognition of a shared memory sent to you from across the room. These simple acts of noticing and speaking our appreciation are all voices of friendship.
And it is not enough that the other person in the boxcar just sees what you see or even feels what you feel. She will jump off the train in the next town and bid you farewell. Don't say that friendship can be defined as the characterization of just anyone who can notice and appreciate. No. It is only when some tried and true, gentle caretaker of your history- someone whose decision to stay in the boxcar or jump off has a lot to do with your plans- graces your life, like salt on your food, with these less-than-crucial-than-oxygen deeds, can it be enough.
And it really can be enough-- deep enough, rich enough, solid enough. Sometimes, maybe simply because life suddenly tastes better, this feels as welcome as oxygen, and who knows why? I don't care why. I'm just glad that I have learned that it is so.
