True friendship exists when human beings share a love of goodness and truth. Two friends alone, like two legs on a table, offer a wobbly situation at best. But two friends anchored to a third, spiritual center form a rock-solid foundation to support everything that comes: hardship, suffering, exaltation, love. True friendship between two human beings exists only when there is a third Friend present: call this third friend God, or simply the Sacred.
Our life has not been an ascent
up one side of a mountain and down the other.
We did not reach a peak,
only to decline and die.
We have been as drops of water,
born in the ocean and sprinkled on the earth
in a gentle rain.
We became a spring,
and then a stream,
and finally a river flowing deeper and stronger,
nourishing all it touches
as it nears its home once again.