To be added to the list of "Reasons Why my Coworkers are Pretty Awesome"

Not only do they have my back in the face of whatever nuttiness happens our way, but they also send me quotes like this:

"I have learned that poetry requires a certain emptiness,

as the sounding of a bell requires the space within it.

I have learned that a soul’s emptiness can become a place where Truth will dwell -even if it is not made welcome, even when Truth is reviled and fought, doubted and misunderstood and resisted.

My own hollowed heart has made a space for others’ pain,

but I believe there is more –some larger Truth we are all heir to."

~ From Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell

Our office door frames and hallways become places where souls unconsciously cluster, whispering the intensely cerebral, the hilariously irreverent, and the answer-less infinite. Music is found in the mundane.

Granted, not everyone would fall into this category, and not everyone will necessarily stay in it, but it's surprising how people can...well, surprise you, if you give them half a chance.

This ties into my recently-sparked obsession with friendship.  Friendship, as CS Lewis wrote, must be "about something." It cannot subsist simply on its own merit. One cannot have a friend simply to "have a friend." 

Even if it's based on something as silly as comic books or Scrabble or wine. Or something as simple as belief or optimism or sense of humor. 

I'm often terrified at the elasticity of relationships. They are so fragile, so easily broken, lost, simply forgotten. But when it is about something, the vast structure of the friendship may crumble, but there always remains a thread from heart to heart, connecting in a network of strings that never completely dissolves, so that when one is tugged or even, at last, severed, we feel its pull on our own.

Every day, I'm shown people that, if I stop, observe, put aside my fear of love for long enough, I may just find that twenty years or longer later, they are still there in some small way. Still tied to my heart.