A Trillion Billion Friends

It's 4:28 AM. I am not up & writing at these desperate hours because life is fun and I want to sit in front of a screen Facebooking & blog, blog, blogging my life away.  

I sit and write because there is something intense and compelling that I have been going through for years -- something that has done much to me and yet in the end, it has simply handed me a pen and commanded, "Write!"  

It is my life. It has been happening to me. And it wants to be written. (Therefore if there is an illusion amongst any of the readers that I do this to attract any further "life (drama!)" -- especially one that is not mine -- then, pray, know that I don't. I don't want to know any more or to think anymore. My writing isn't to create turbulence or catastrophe. It is to reach stillness. It is not to gain, but to give. That is all I have: nothing!) 

And now this thought was parenthetical because it is an aside. As can be noted, the subject at hand is "Friends."  

I felt, a mere three days ago, that I have no friend. Now whenever I confess to that particular feeling, it sends many of the dear people whose lives have served me and mine theirs in friendship, in considerable shock. Why am I writing this when this is not - what - I - intended - to - write! 

I write this because writing wants to be written. It takes its own course. It is because my heart is telling a story and I am the figurative pen, the literal keyboard. I have no command over this story. 

Now, for any dear soul which is confounded -- join the come & go club. At this moment, I am no longer in the club. I am not confounded myself. 

At this moment, my friends are countless. I tell you how so. 

I was retreating to my room for the night when I noticed the pillow and the covers on my bed ready to comfort me for the night. I stopped in amazement. What a human quality that is! To hold someone together, to cover them, to give them warmth. In some way, to aid their sleep. It is a quality so human, it is divine. I wondered. 

I looked around at things in my house. The chair I sit on, the cushions I lean on, this computer that aids me so greatly in my writing and living that I would have been dead without it -- and I mean it: this machine has saved my life. It has given me a life. I looked at my bed again, the clothes that I am arranging. Earlier, when the power went out, I chose to step out in the lawn, lie down on the grass, and bathe in moonlight. Question and Answer, the two curious kittens who reside in our garden, came and hopped over me. This is what they do; I am family to them. Question, indeed, insists upon a greater companionship -- hence the name. Together, Q&A as I affectionately call them, decidedly accompany wherever I go in the house. They want to offer enacting their kitten fights and -- yes, this too! -- giving their "clean-up licks" to me. I am part of their family, the Big Sistah Cat. They are kind enough to not see me as human, but as just another cat. 

I am touched. I am touched by what the plants do too. They dance when I am with them. Now every avid gardener knows but hides the eccentric fact that plants can understand (human) sound and respond. They also have a sense of visual attention. I am aware of their presence and their language; so well, that sometimes I forget to notice. 

It took a set of inanimate things this night to suddenly break this spell of feeling physically cut off, wandering, and alone. 

I have noticed tonight after a long, long, long time how everything is connected to me. It is connected to me, it is my friend. The thought that I am the product of all my life had been swirling in my mind like dusty little windwhirls on a summer afternoon. Now, I just get it. It's not a mental twirling thought. It is a fact. 

I am embraced. I am embraced by trillion-billion of atoms, certainly even more... all of them innumerable things. Expectations manage to lock in my attention on a few set of atoms, and often those are people. More often, those are not even these atoms, but thoughts. 

Cold as it may seem to think you are embraced by atoms -- for God's warm sake!! -- this is exactly what I mean. 

Warmth and life have a way of reaching to us. Through our beds and shoes and machines. It is a marvel how life holds us together. It is a marvel how care has a way of getting through to us, being around us. I simply marvel at all these things and the comfort of friendship they provide. I also marvel at how my life is designed such that everything makes me happen, makes me live. I marvel at how it all seems to be coming in my direction, placed around me, in an attitude of service and giving. 

This is really what it is!  

I also marvel at why my attention for years had become locked in a very few things! How long has it been since I have felt that it is not only other mere mortals who bring life to me? Quite a while.  

Tonight -- by this early morning that is about to come -- I have felt again that which is the truth: I am in the comfort of a Friend. And it is not a friend who isolates me into desperation. But makes me desperate until I see the marvel.  

Why, a rather persistent friendship this is, and one that gives me more than a calculable number of friends. It gives me as many friends as there are ways of counting everything in the world -- and then it gives me everything.