These hands ........

These are the hands of 85 years of friendship. They are the hands of countless told and untold stories, experiences, love and pain, of hurt and heartbreak and all that were shared by two men who refused to ever give up on each other. These are the hands of my 89yo father and one of his closest friends who passed away recently.

This powerful photo brought me completely unstuck, causing an inner body experience that left me reeling from a sense of both overwhelming gratefulness and sadness for my father and for all the stories, the friendships and relationships that have been and those that continue to be part of my own life and the journey that is the becoming of "me".

How lucky are we to know even one relationship/friendship such as this. They don't have to be intimate, but they have to endure. Perhaps for 'a reason, a season or a lifetime'. Perhaps it is the sort of relationship that you walk away from at times, but know that you can return to without judgement only toward acceptance and love. Relationships like this respect the need for space, understand the need to love from a distance at times, respect and honour that as humans we are on a constant journey of change, growth and evolution. Even when have to simply sit back and observe the painful journey of another, when your heart is breaking and desperate to reconnect, there are times when all you can do is stand by, pray for a miracle and wait for that person to walk back into your life at the time of their choosing. There is a powerless-ness is this action of friendship. Relinquishing the control of wanting to change things, wanting to fix things and just allowing time to bring forth what will be revealed, trusting that whatever the result life is as is should be.

But this is the purist of friendship.