Friendships in the Blogging world

Blogging brings with it the temptation and false illusion of deep friendships.

Last night I was thinking about the many, many people I’ve had the opportunity to get to know   via my wordpress blog since  2007

I’ve observed a pattern.

most  eventually drift away…not all of them, but most.

It is actually a good thing.

Apple trees do the same thing every summer.  (we have a small orchard)

The tree start out with hundreds of newly pollinated apples in late May, but by early June, many have fallen to the ground.  The remaining apples  will then  have the nourishment and energy they require to mature.

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The following is a portion of an essay on friendships by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

      “Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen.”

     Bashfulness and apathy are a tough husk, in which a delicate organization is protected from premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it.

Respect the naturlangsamkeit which hardens the ruby in a million years, and works in duration.”

Naturlangsamkeit: a German word for a slow process of ripening.

(In other words, friendships take time to ripen…you can’t really hurry the process….)

      “There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness .”

       “We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man, who, ….. cast off this drapery, and, omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting, as indeed he could not help doing, for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms…… But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plain-dealing. 

     “The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity (Magnanimous: generous in forgiving) and trust”.

  “I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest thing we know.”

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I’ve had the  privilege to meet (4)  of you  fellow bloggers  in person since 2008.   Felt like I was meeting a long lost sibling each time…which tells me that the process of  “Naturlangsamkeit” was in fact taking place….

      It is possible to build healthy friendships via your blog.

And finally, I posted  this on facebook last night:

       There is magic in long-distance friendships. They let you relate to other human beings in a way that goes beyond being physically together and is often more profound. ~Diana Cortes

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Tags: Christianity, friendship, Life, loneliness, personal, relationships, spirituality, thoughts