When do we do embrace and when do we distance ourselves from one another?
I think of us as magnets. We either attract or repel. My daily walks in the park with my dog highlight this point. Canines either engage and play with one another or snap and run away.
Last week I attended a book party at the Corner Bookstore (on Madison Avenue and 93rd St) to hear the poets Molly Peacock and Phillis Levin discuss their decades long friendship with each other, detailed in Molly’s intriguing new mosaic of a prose and poetry, A Friend Sails in on a Poem.
Peacock has pieced together journalistic tidbits of their ventures in different places, including enticing food venues, along with some of their magnificent poems. The reader is privy to how they have nurtured each other and each other’s art, not by critiquing each other’s writing, but by listening, appreciating, encouraging and, at times, offering a sprinkling of helpful suggestions.Their relationship has deepened and mutually rewarded them for decades.
They met and were drawn to each other in their twenties in a poetry workshop at Johns Hopkins University and immediately recognized and embraced the differences in each other. How rare an art!
Peacock acknowledges she began as a confessional poet who doesn’t hesitate to expose her foibles, while Levin reveals herself as reserved and hesitant to expose the personal.
The morning after the reading, I wondered about what draws us to one another and, alternatively, what repulses?
Yesterday’s session with Mr. K. (name changed to mask his identity) popped into mind: Mr. K is thinking of ending his relationship with his woman friend of two years because she doesn’t like his friends and refuses to socialize with them. He can’t imagine how he can build a life with someone who doesn’t appreciate his friends. Neither of them cares to explore the causes for her dislike. It is what it is, just like puppies in the park.
The opposite of love is not hate, which embodies an attachment of another kind. Rather, it is indifference that smacks of lack of caring.
Love involves sharing, accepting, caring, wanting the best for the other. Also important, though challenging at times, is doing something, participating, engaging in an activity that we’d prefer not to. Love can involve stepping out of our comfort zone.
Competition can also obstruct friendship. Peacock and Levin acknowledge that competition was never an issue between them. Mutual regard for both similarities and differences lies at the foundation of their relationship.
Hurting another’s feelings either intentionally or inadvertently distances the other.
Honest communication is as essential to a relationship as soil and water are to nurturing a plant. By contrast dishonesty devalues our integrity and wounds our feelings as an arrow punctures flesh. I experienced this a few years ago in a relationship with a colleague whom I at first very much admired for her brilliance. Sadly, I had to let go and lose the benefits of our relationship when dishonesty undermined and dissolved the bond.
From Peacock’s A Friend Sails in on a Poem: “The reflection of love is in our diary entries from these years. At odd moments at breakfast in Cazenovia, together we made a shorthand of weather, food, and poem titles.”
Conclusion: Caring relationships are essential and are responsible for (the essence of ) our humanity and well-being.
Dear Readers, I welcome your comments. jsimon145@gmail.com
