Poem on friendship and commentary

An original poem and supplemental thoughts

Poem on Friendship

CS Lewis said friendship is the most irrational kind of love,
After all, shouldn’t we be competing?
Isn’t it a zero sum game?
How beautiful to find admiration and support in another,
To appreciate the nuances of another’s company and character,
The particulars of the wave that seem so real and separate, 
When they are all a part of the same great ocean as you

AI Generated Image From Canva - it appears I was unintentionality added on the far left

---

Commentary

A couple times this past fall, I experienced tremendous feelings of awe around friendships. Forgive me for romanticizing the obvious… it is just amazing to be alive and to overlap lives with people that we admire, enjoy and appreciate.

As humans we participate in a web of interconnectedness. There is a powerful spiritual metaphor of the ocean and the wave. As individuals we are like waves in the ocean of existence, separate in appearance but fundamentally connected as part of a larger whole.

We want to be known for our uniqueness, but real satisfaction comes from connection with others. One of my mentors has taught me that object separation is an illusion, that although people appear distinct and separate, on the spiritual level there is no separation, just one collective experience also known as oneness or is-ness.

While I believe this to be true, this reality somewhat saddens me. So much of our human experience is our wrestling with identities, our own and the identities that we project onto those around us. Recognizing that what I appreciate about the people in my life is real, but not absolutely real is challenging. At the collective level, the people I love are the same people that I don’t care much about, and when our lives as we know them end and we as waves return to the ocean there will be just indeterminable oneness.