It's easy to take your friends for granted. So sometimes I try to approach my friends as an empathetic stranger might: curious, wanting to know and understand them, despite their strangeness, because of that strangeness. For they fascinate with the things they see, offering Pandora's boxes in which the everyday appear as gems, wonders that radiate from mundane material. You want examples of these gems? They're hard to show. You have to be there to get it. The moment the familiar turned, with a phrase, or a gesture, into something fine and strange: the tree, with the stars tangled in its branches. The difficulty in showing that moment is a reminder that fellowship is rooted in experience, in the experience of the particular. In that phrase, in that gesture, fellowship renews itself and friendship is reaffirmed.





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