I’m with a group of eight women at Rivendell, a serene and slightly rustic retreat centre set high above Snug Cove on Bowen Island. It’s a relief to be out of the city, even though I’m always a little homesick when I’m away from the cats and the familiarity of life on Ringwood Avenue.

The group I’m with is called New Edges and, although I’m friends with a few of the long time members, this is my first time attending. They’ve been meeting annually in different parts of the world for many years and are devoted to advancing the evolution of human consciousness.

The following piece was read during our opening circle on Monday and it touched me deeply. I’m familiar with David Whyte’s work but this excerpt was new to me. It is from his book CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.

Friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die…

Friendship is the great hidden transmuter of all relationship: it can transform a troubled marriage, make honorable a professional rivalry, make sense of heartbreak and unrequited love and become the newly discovered ground for a mature parent-child relationship.

The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence…

Friendship transcends disappearance: an enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversational way even after one half of the bond has passed on.

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the self nor of the other, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

This piece brought me to tears when I first heard it. As I contemplate it now, I am left with the word “witness”. Whether it’s the witness of each other’s joy and accomplishments or the witness of each other’s grief and despair, we need each other more than we can possibly know.

There is no greater gift than being seen as who we are, warts and all, week after week. As you read my words, you are offering me the gift of friendship by witnessing my passage through this mini crucible of weekly blogs.

Ultimately, though, what counts is being a gracious witness to ourselves. That isn’t always easy, as I well know. With my blog writing experiment comes a pretty vicious inner critic that is not very supportive of of my less developed selves. The perfectionist in me wants to get it ‘right’ (as if there was such a thing…) and the inevitable Law of Diminishing Returns sets in.

With this installment I’ve hit the quarter year mark. It’s only been possible because of my friends, who have mirrored back encouragement to keep sharing these tender, more expressive parts of me. Internal friendship is not quite so easy to find but I’m working on it. Today that means saying thank you for being here, for reading this, for being my friend. It also means saying — not perfect, but good enough!

How could you be a better friend to yourself? Is there some aspect of you that needs to be witnessed by another? Let me know, I’d love to hear!