You gotta have friends

The end of October is always a time of deep reflection for me. This year the reflection seems especially intense as the last 12 months have brought massive tides of endings and beginnings - a full-tilt career transition, a tectonic shift in my primary relationship, the loss of several significant friendships, the deepening of other friendships (I would argue, as a result). Not all of this movement is negative; it simply is. When the sand shifts under your feet, you can't trust your foundation. This is when you have to look up, and out, and around you. Turn to God or Source or however you imagine the great Being at the Center of the Universe who created you. Turn to your family who will, hopefully, keep your best interests in heart and mind at all times. And turn to your friends, those men and women in your life who can be called upon even in the most shadowy moments. I think of those people in my life who know all my secrets, my hopes, my fears. I share all with my Circle. And the people who inhabit that space have my lifelong and unyielding loyalty. It's a sacred trust. There is very little movement in that inner sanctum of my life. But you have to earn your way in.

I laugh a little as I write this - I have a massive outer circle (like 1500 contacts between Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter), and engage in regular communication with about 200 people a week. I run an executive leadership training program in the private sector and travel extensively in that role, which adds another several hundred people to the list of regular contacts. And yet that innermost circle, my tribal council, totals about 12 people. The contrast is stark. I am one of those people who everybody thinks they know, and yet there is much I never reveal to anyone but a select few. That's the witch in me, I suppose - the part of me that allows myself to be widely consumed in a vague sense but only narrowly consumed in Truth.

I am deeply grateful for the presence of the people who have walked that long way with me. They share my love of life, my passion for adventure and creation, my belief in things unseen, my distaste for judgment. We meditate together, sit in silence together, talk for hours about nothing together, laugh together, cry together, hold space for each other when we are separated by time or space. They text me at 11:11 with a happy face. And they know that I'll walk to the ends of the Earth for them. And back. Because to me, love is how you show up when life is hard.