Friendship.

Some days we have need of silence and time away from the world, just to save ourselves from drowning in the life that surrounds us, activities we've created but can't sustain endlessly without some kind of input from someplace else.

A friend threw a lifeline this morning. She wrote asking if Vienna was close if she attended a conference held there.

I wrote back, 'Of course!'

And she wrote back asking if I had time for Italy and/or Greece while she over.
You can imagine, I replied with another 'Of course!'.

We ended up talking on skype and imnmediately fell into the conversation and laughter of old friends reunited. We talked about everything. She's a wise woman, a doctor of clinical psychology, a writer, a person who used to walk beaches and drink wine with me back in the dark days of my marriage breakdown.

I miss the messy time-consuming deliciousness of that kind of friendship here in this country not my own ... but perhaps it is complicated by the fact that my life is no longer just my own.

Back then, before I was 20 and still in Dunedin, there were people like Fiona and Liz, Paul and Martin and Chris - to name just a few. There were long conversations, motorbikes and horses on days that, in memory, seem long and sunfilled, quite unlike this Belgian life I live now. Afterwards, moving towns every few years there were people like Anne in Cromwell, Christine in Marlborough, Sue in Te Anau, Corryl and Pippa on my return to Dunedin and so many more I can't name because the list would probably seem long and boring to anyone but me.

There's an Italian saying 'Chi trova un amico trova un tesoro'. I've carried that with me in a tatty old journal for years. I have been told it translates as, he who finds a friend finds a treaure.
It is surely true.

And so, my day turned around some ... from a day filled by an unrelenting load of work that has to be complete by Wednesday, and other work that has to be finished as soon as possible, it became a day with a little bit of hope that one of those great spirits who sustained me in my past, might wander into this life for a while and fill it with good conversations and the easy laughter of an old friendship.

I hope so.