For my recent birthday, a friend gave me a painting by her, and when I looked at the backside, I realized how much it held.
I don’t know if we have a good working definition of friendship, so I will offer one: a relationship between two people who understand each other (but not completely), accept each other (but not foolishly), and walk together (figuratively).
I think you can measure a person by their friendships. A person with long, sustained friendships. A person who is able to form new ones. A person who does not have a trail of broken friendships.
Tibetan thankas have on the front side a painting of a bodhisattva and on the back side the red handprints and writing of the monk who blessed the thanka and brought it to life.
When I looked at the back side of my friend’s painting, she had written a kind of benediction, sharing when in her life and why she had done the painting. I thought, “This is like a monk’s blessing of a thanka.” This painting lives. And she gave it to me.
A friendship, just as I defined it, once new, now sustained.
“And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;”
Robert Frost, The Tuft of Flowers