One of the biggest concerns for me as I navigate these post-COVID streets is that of friendships. In these last four years I've fallen out with every friend that I love in some way, shape, or form. Some friendships I've dissolved with no closure. I simply allowed silence and distance to swallow what was once between us. In this time, as well, friendships have rebounded and deepened, and new unexpected friendships have revealed themselves without the weight of time and history, proving to be stronger than the ones that I'd invested time and energy into.
Friendships, for me, have bore the weight of a responsibility that I probably should've cleared before the embarkment. Family wasn't strong when I was coming up, so the responsibility that I placed on friendships was weighty and unfair. From 13 to 47 years, I expected my friendships to take the space and place of my family, which, now I see was an erroneous approach, and was unfair, to the friends that I was embracing. I wanted my friends to be "family", to only realize that friends are not family. They have family that they are committed to. And trust, blood is thicker than water. And they ARE NOT your family and are not committed to you. At all.
With the above in mind, in these last few years, I've had to place myself properly in concerns of loving friendships. Having to realize that I will never be more important than blood in all of my relationships has been a harsh reality, but has encouraged me to invest and deepen my familial relationships and that to myself. No matter what, family is family, and blood recognizes and responds to blood. Every birthday I spend with my mom, hearing the voice of my dad post seven strokes, or taking in the prayers of my grandma lets me know that the blood of family makes the difference and has an active effect on my life.
However, I am aware that sometimes family don't connect on that spirit level. And if nothing else, COVID presented to us either/or options where we all had to make decisions to stand face to face with ourselves and our others. In this assessment we faced that things weren't adding up for where we were challenged to look at deeply.
Now on this side of COVID, as I look at the landscape of my inner circle friendships, I have to admit it is smaller and categorized. The reality is that change is constant, as well as a reality. I had an experience with a close sister-friend of mine that revealed that we are no longer congruent and may have to relearn one another or separate totally. I've changed. She's changed. And sometimes the changes are so apparent that if you both don't have patience to relearn one another you will relate to one another from an old paradigm, and totally miss the gifts that can be garnered from the new people you have become and are becoming. I am realizing that people don't want to deal with the new, including me, because it requires us to question self and upgrade our sense of self and the other. The questioning of yourself when another grows beyond your idea of them is a death to self. A death to self is always hard. Sometimes it surrenders with a white flag. Sometimes it fights, coughs, reels, and leaves its eyes open and blinking, dying a slow hard death that bucks against the reality of a new thing.
My point? Review the relationships that have remained. For me, those that have made it through the trial of the re-try, fire, and reverb, I am keeping. Diamonds are tried and hard pressed becoming more valuable. and precious, and true. Those that have died without a forwarding word, whether I didn't come back with a willingness to try again, or they didn't, I am resolving that for now, we are done. I have resolved that some relationships dissolved because the reliance that I had in their opinion, value, and love for me, I had to cultivate in myself. If I kept the relationship in that current state, I would've never made the strides in myself that was needed to move me to a space of "in lovedness" that I am now experiencing in and with me.
For the new relationships I have gained... man, they are yummy loving, especially from my brothers. Hetero, Gay, Bi, and Other, they have come in a way that covers, loves, instructs, and loves again, helping me to come to a wholeness within me where my fathers and former partners were not able to provide. These new and renewed relationships have added a great deal to me as a person. Some of these I have had fall outs with, BUT, the relationships have deepened as result, to the point that their very Spirits have joined with mine for our mutual elevation. The veil is thin and eventually non-existent, as their ancestral and spiritual entourages are joining hands with my own to move the universe forward. Relationships and friendships are no longer for individual gain. Friendships and intimate relationships are for the forward movement of a universal progression and if we get caught up in juvenile catty shit, we will miss and utterly destroy the elevation that the Universe is asking of us as a part of the Godhead to move the very agenda of our bloodlines forward.
Invest in friendships. Heal relationships that you are not ready to let go. Bridge the gap in family relationships. The Godhead never moves off the head only. The Godhead needs the body to operate fully and to ring in the miracles in this next dispensation. Be careful you are not so invested in cutting off and setting straight that you edge yourself out of the next amazing times that will pour into your evolution, success, happiness, and legacy that lays the path for the generations to come after you. There is an ancestral and spiritual body that is joining energies to push an elevated agenda towards a higher end. For us All.
Love you tremendously,
Jeanetta