Statue'd gnomes

She wrote how odd to say good-bye to family and friends, joined together for the annual family reunion. You say good-bye every year, but for her, and for them, it was good-bye. She stared out the window and wrote that no matter how hard she tried, she could not keep them all in the back yard forever like statue’d garden gnomes. They are gone, but still, more importantly, their life remains. How different they would have celebrated, in years past, had they known today was near.

Rumi writes of a group of men who went to see another they heard had gone mad. The madman threw stones at them and away they ran. He calls out that 'See you are not friends!' Friends do not run from pain, even if inflicted by the other. “A friend is pure gold singing inside the refining fire.”  George Elliot wrote “Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.”

A simple thread, I readily confess my thoughts are odd.  But to not see others as statue’d garden gnomes, kept for their presence, unwilling to enter the fire or to sift the chaff from the grain. And then the thread tangles with another, that perhaps allows the first to become real. To awaken to the day, and with the same heart, whisper to Life, ‘You are my friend. Today is near’