On the Art and Power of Friendship
A special conversation series with Kimberlyn David, Part 1
Note: This post contains two audio files - a short guided meditation, and a 50-minute conversation. Both can be found towards the end of the post. Enjoy!
Dear Enchantable readers,
I invite you to think about the role of friendship in your lives:
How are you touched by the unique love of friendship?
What is your definition of a friend?
What is the value of friendship to you?
What do you learn from your friendships?
What does it really mean to be a friend?
These are some of the questions I explore in this conversation on the art and power of friendship, with my dear friend-love1, thought partner, and collaborator of more than a decade, Kimberlyn David, who I affectionately call KD (even beyond transcript notes), who I refer to as “the doula of Enchantable” (among many other things!). A little more about Kimberlyn:
Kimberlyn David loves developing stories that awaken a sense of possibility (she’s a writer and communications professional, after all!). One of her favorite quotes on the intersection of language and transformative action comes from Thich Nhat Hanh: "Compassion is a verb." A traveler at heart, Kimberlyn hails from NYC and has extensively roamed parts of the US, Latin America, the Balkans and Europe. She currently lives in the Netherlands.
This year through Enchantable, I want to bring you more love stories of the non-romantic kind: friendship love stories, more-than-human love stories, stories that remind us of the vastness of love and its many expressions. I also want to bring you more collaborations and more voice, in both the sense of bringing more audio recordings to my posts, and also in the sense of bringing more voices in the form of inspiring guests.
This relates to something Kimberlyn shares in the conversation. In her words,
“It's always more important than ever, but it really, is at this time, so important that we feel comfortable in our own voices, that we use our own voices, and so this [conversaion] is a way to literally practice expressing whatever it is we feel our hearts feel called to express at this time and to be comfortable with that, or at least to be comfortable with the discomfort sometimes of sharing our voices.”
It is in that spirit that we offer this conversation on the art power of friendship.
We will have a few of these conversations coming out over the course of the year (perhaps until we run out of things to say - to be determined :). We will be sharing the lightly edited audio file of our conversation as well as quotes from the transcript. We hope you enjoy it, and we hope it inspires you to think about the way the power of friendship manifests in your life. You can find the audio recording of our conversation at the end of this post.
In our conversation, we mainly dance around the question of, “What is a friend?” and meander across entangled themes such as: the Buddhist notion of noble friendship; friendship as bearing witness; friendship as interbeing; friendship as a practice; patriarchy’s effects on friendship; friendship as being there; the differences between friendliness, kindness, and niceness; the overlap and distinctions between friends and community; and friendliness power.
A few of my favorite quotes from the episode, which I hope will inspire you to give it a listen:
“Friendship feels like the ultimate space to practice who it is we really want to be in the world. And it's highly reciprocal.” -KD
“While, of course, there's always going to be whispers of patriarchy and everything because that's the world we live in, our friendship is not bound by those rules.” -KD
“Friendships are the great love stories of my life.” -SKS
“Going back to that idea again of friendship as practice, friendship is a safe place to practice showing up for others as fully as possible with generosity, with everything. And if we can do that in the space of friendship, we can expand that outward and do it elsewhere.” -KD
“How can we break down some of these barriers so that more friendship is possible for people?” -KD
“I do think it's important to be in community with people you're not necessarily friends with because I think, at the end of the day, particularly when we're thinking about building peace, building regenerative, healthy communities in which people can thrive, it actually means showing up for people that you aren't necessarily friends with and figuring out how to do life with people who you don't agree with, who you wouldn't hang out with by choice.” -SKS
“Imagine if certain leaders in the world were to adopt this approach of friendliness, what we might be able to accomplish differently in terms of trust, in terms of community building; if they just really set the bar instead of, at times, quite frankly, doing the opposite.” -KD
“Can you be in touch with your friendliness power if you're concerned with being nice all the time? I would say maybe not, probably not friendliness power, because you have to then be friendly to yourself enough. And going back to interbeing, if we can't have that approach of friendliness to ourselves, honestly, how can we fully have it towards others?” -KD
In the conversation, we talk quite a bit about metta (lovingkindness) meditation, and as a little bonus, I offer you this short guided meditation recording I made a few years ago. The conversation ends (a little abruptly - we’re learning! :) with the line “I feel like we've given folks a way that they can practice with the energy of friendliness and a little take-home.” So here is your take-home practice of friendliness!
At we concluded, Kimberlyn proposed that I should write a friendship blessing, as I do in many Enchantable posts, so with that inspiration, I offer you this:
May we be touched by the power of friendship in our lives.
May we be held in the power of friend-love.
May friendliness extend to all our relationships.
May we widen our scope of friendliness
and dwell in the abundance and generosity that friendship brings to our lives
and the gift that is each unique friend.
May our friendships allow us to practice being ourselves fully
so that we can show up for ourselves, our friends, and our communities.
With the immense power of friendship,
Stephanie and Kimberlyn
Here’s the conversation!
Resources referenced in our conversation:
Metta Center for Nonviolence: I couldn’t remember the acronym upon which the organization was originally founded. It’s MARIN EXPERIMENTAL TEACHER TRAINING AND ADVISING CENTER. Check it out! They do much more than teacher training.
The article Kimberlyn referenced on friendship:
Book by Dr. Anna Machin (Why We Love: The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships):
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Love/Anna-Machin/9781643139227
This phrase comes from Yumi Sakugawa and her sweet book I Think I Am In Friend-Love Wth You.