My Deepest Spiritual Practice:
Befriending the World
“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light.” - James Baldwin
I define a friend as an intimate witness who magnifies your being.*
I came to this personal definition after a lifetime of struggling with friendship & loneliness. In my mid-twenties, I finally decided to embark on a friendship project, where I interviewed people about their experiences with friendship: the joys, challenges, insecurities, logistics, possibilities, limitations. These interviews deeply transformed how I behold and navigate the world. One of my friends, Angie, mentioned that she sees everyone as a friend. While initially doubtful, I decided to play with that idea.
What would happen if I considered everyone a friend - if I believed every single being was an intimate witness who magnified my being? If I believed it was my responsibility and birthright to be witnesses who magnify them in turn? What would that invite, demand, evoke from me? And where does "everyone" end - only with humans? What about ancestors? More-than-human kin? Characters? How might I think more expansively about friendship, and how might this transform how I experience and interact with the world? This has led to a multi-year experiment and the beginning of a life-long love affair with friendship.
Therefore, when Krista Tippett defines spirituality as "befriending reality in all its complexity, in its danger, in its beauty, in its contradiction" - and when Ursula Le Guin reminds us that we must be "realists of a larger reality" - I started to realize that my spirituality was rooted in friendship. Befriending a larger reality - befriending the world around me - is my deepest spiritual practice. It necessitates reflecting on witness, boundaries, communication, pleasure, rest, support, love, dignity, divinity, and belonging. When I truly move at a pace where I try to intimately witness and magnify every being I come across - whether my morning coffee, the tomato plant on my back patio, a friend I am texting, a beloved I'm speaking to, a book character I'm reading - something different is demanded of me.
More than anything, friendship is my deepest spiritual practice & commitment. Therefore, many of my practices are aimed at helping me be present enough to witness the world in ways that tap into, conspire with, and magnify our liberatory potential.
*Inspired in part by Elie Wiesel, Maria Popova, and James Baldwin.
Current Friendship Offerings
Here are a few of my projects & offerings around friendship
Literary Friendship Journal & Mini-Series
With 4 human friends, I designed an experiment to explore: what happens if we consider a character as a friend? Using my own personal definition of a friend, my friends and I explored the liberatory possibilities of literary friendship. I made this guided journal as a way for them to experiment with deepening their relationship with a character and to ultimately test her hypothesis: can characters help us live more deeply into our values? (Spoiler: yes!) I ultimately turned this into a 10 episode mini-series, where I interviewed these friends about their experiences & discoveries along the way.