It is something — it can be everything — to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.
–Wallace Stegner
A Mindful Life / Kathryn Harper
express : discover : renew : create
That quote really strikes home.
Some long time ago, I moved from Illinois to Colorado and was for a while friendless in a new city.
It seemed the first people I met all had intense dramas they wanted to involve me in, and there was no one I knew with whom I could escape from those dramas. Fortunately, I eventually met some folks who were far the maddening crowd and made friends with them, but I’ll never forget the loneliness of those first months in a new city.
I’ve even had this feeling at a haiku conference, where everybody wants to discuss or go look for promising topic material, and I just want to sit under a pine away from the madding crowd and sniff the breeze…
am somewhat disappointed, on second reading, to find that it’s “fellow” and not “yellow” — just because the former reads more easily as a metaphor for a good friend, and the latter allows for all kinds of distance and connections…
Wallace Stegner got this one right.
I have spent my entire life without a good “friend” in the sense of someone I’m not related to by blood or marriage (or marriage equivalence). Can’t say why, but now I accept that’s my fate.