friendship (haibun)

Our host , Chèvrefeuille, writes a very moving post at Carpe Diem Haiku Kai, about friendship before continuing on to the lesson in The Pilgrimage on acknowledging friends and support around us.
In times of sorrow or personal strife, I have found solace in my solitude, my writing and my readers. The latter have become friends from afar, who have read my words and “got it”, felt it and embraced it.
I love this passage we are referred to on friendship:

[…] ‘Once, a poet said that no man is an island. In order to fight the good fight, we need help. We need friends, and when the friends aren’t nearby, we have to turn solitude into our main weapon. We need the help of everything around us in order to take the necessary steps toward our goal. Everything has to be a personal manifestation of our will to win the good fight. If we don’t understand that, then we don’t recognize that we need everything and everybody, and we become arrogant warriors. And our arrogance will defeat us in the end, because we will be so sure of ourselves that we won’t see the pitfalls there on the field of battle.’ […](Source: The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho)

How true! Amma, (Mata Amritanandamayi) says, “We are all beads strung together on the same thread of love”.

Amma’s Facebook page

As much as I love to help others, be supportive and it is part of my work as a counsellor as well, I find it difficult to ask for help. I am working on that. It is not arrogance but perhaps the attitude, “I can do it on my own” may be my giving into vanity which is really the same thing.

on pebbled roads
my walking stick breaks
a rest is due

watching travellers go by
humbly ask a stranger’s help

limping’s not so bad
free of a heavy knapsack
a comrade now carts

©Tournesol’17/01/22

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