"You came when you were needed
I could not ask for more,
then to turn and find you walking
through the kitchen door."
Kate Wolf

I'm listening to the album Gold in California, sipping green tea, and thinking about friendship. Last night over tea and chocolate at a friends we started discussing the nature of friendship, and particularly, whether or not a person can truly be friends with his parents. What is a friend, and is friendship so distinct from filial love that the latter supersedes it? Friendship is such a misunderstood form of love - real friendships are rare and hard to come by, but our culture has replaced it with social obligations, acquaintances, filial love, and affection.

Think about it a bit. What is friendship? Who can you enter into a friendship with? What is required?

"Friends should be only like dance and music. One should never come to them deliberately, but always out of some spontaneous need. Friends should be outcomes; on the way they are hindrances." - Rainer Maria Rilke

"Friends do not ward off our loneliness, they only set bounds to our solitude." - Rainer Maria Rilke

"if it weren't for kitchen songs and mornings spent with friends
we all might lose the things we love the best." - Kate Wolf

I love to think over all my good friends, scattered now across the country living their different lives. So many of these friendship grew up around steaming mugs or cold beers, at kitchen tables heavy with conversation. It is always easiest to discuss over coffee or tea - the strongest disagreements are soothed by the steam, and each sips warms and calms us.

"Somehow in that warm room with coffee on the stove
our hearts were really most at home." - Kate Wolf