life: acoustic & amplified

a friend loves at all times 

How will you know your real friends? Pain is as dear to them as life. A friend is like gold. Trouble is like fire. Pure gold delights in the fire.        ~ Rumi

  
And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain. 

And he said: 

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses 

       your understanding. 

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its 

       heart may stand in the sun, so must you know 

       pain. 

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily 

       miracles of your life, your pain would not seem 

       less wondrous than your joy; 

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, 

       even as you have always accepted the seasons

       that pass over your fields. 

And you would watch with serenity through the 

       winters of your grief. 
Much of your pain is self-chosen, 

It is the bitter potion by which the physician within 

       you heals your sick self. 

Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy 

       in silence and tranquility: 

For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by 

       the tender hand of the Unseen, 

And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has 

       been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has

       moistened with His own sacred tears. 

   – Kahlil Gibran: On Pain

   

 JOY

is a form of deep intentionality and self forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formally seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, song, music in the kitchen: the sheer beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us. 

Joy can be a practiced achievement not just the unlooked for passing act of grace arriving out of nowhere, joy is a measure of our relationship to death and our living with death, joy is the act of giving ourselves away, joy is practiced generosity. If joy is a deep form of love, it is also the raw engagement with the passing seasonality of existence, the fleeting presence of those we love going in and out of our lives, faces, voices, memory, aromas of the first spring day or a wood fire in winter, the last breath of a dying parent as they create that rare, raw, beautiful frontier between loving presence and a new and blossoming absence. 

To feel a full untrammeled joy is to walk through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious worried self felt itself like a death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, seen in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain, a sky or a familiar face – I am here and you are here and together we make a world.

   – Joy by David Whyte

Listen to Andrew Gold sing Thank You for being a Friend http://youtu.be/Jzrq52qaXZI

photos found atwww.pinterest.com