🕊️ The unregarded power between rejection and acceptance ❌
When I accept a friend’s smile, I am all at once with my friend. I cannot recall anything of the moment prior to the infusion into my being of the smile.
I so am overtaken by the oscillating wave of friendship immediately upon recognition of the smile, that there is no need to analyse or rationalise the small deep joy of this human connection. It is just joy.
In fact, I never do stand aside to look at this process. And I may not be able to, because it is a trigger at a primitive level of our gregarious collective human nature.
And yet something does exist between the seeing and the surrender to the seen.
It may only be the smallest glimpse of something. And it shines clear and pure and true.
The quality of the purity and human truth present in a transaction of simple friendship is of the same order as is striven for throughout human history and which is sung and celebrated and held in the greatest esteem by thinkers and artists, sages and leaders, from the furthest reaches of recorded time.
If I do understand any of it at all, I feel it is a reflection of primal power of the life force itself that I have witnessed in the smile shared between my friend and I.
E.E.Cummings, in this poem, makes contact with this primal power with the delicacy, as it feels to me, of the wingbeats of some vaporous cosmic butterfly …
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile
The View at 72+ 