We all get by with a little help from our friends.

Friendship is a sheltering tree. -Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I recently read this quote on a Yogi tea bag and immediately thought about my friends and what it means to be a friend. It’s easy to throw this word around, especially in today’s world where we’re constantly meeting, connecting, visiting, sharing, and so on. We have social friends, work friends, college friends, mom friends, dad friends, school friends, coffee shop friends, neighborhood friends…you get the idea. While all of these relationships may have meaning, we ultimately have our soul friends – the friends who will celebrate the highs and support in the lows, who are there for you regardless of time of day or distance. They likely fall into another friend group, too.
These friends are something special. 
Many of my soul friends are also my college friends. We’ve stood by each other through many cocoon-to-butterfly phases and many butterfly-to-cocoon phases. Growing alongside each other comes with growing pains and regular reminders of what it means to be a friend.
I’m discovering that one of my longest college friends may not be a soul friend like I thought they were. Over the years, I have continued to see, and am finally learning to accept, that their words don’t match their actions. Our friendship has had many parallels to water hitting the shore – sometimes it was a big wave crashing on the shore, other times the wave reaches shore and keeps going until it floods the the blankets and chairs on the sand. If you’re lucky, you might catch our friendship on a pleasant day when the water is peaceful and small waves create a lovely ocean sound.
Can you tell I’m ready for some warm spring days in the Mid-Atlantic?! Anyway, this friend and I have been through a lot together. Traveling, death, health issues, moving around, and more. This past year, we reached a new depth in our conversations, speaking honestly and openly about the gratitude we had for each other, the discomfort we’ve experienced, and the areas of life we want to challenge ourselves to grow into. Many times we expressed gratitude in having the other person in our life and were thankful that it was one of those decade-long relationships.
Then they entered a relationship and our friendship and relationship went from being on the stove in our kitchens to moving to a totally new kitchen many time zones away. At first I was saying that the holidays caused a disruption in our regular communication. Then the holidays weeks behind us. I shared some pictures of an event they attended with me; no acknowledgment of receipt. I invited them to a concert that I was going to be going to of an artist that they introduced me to. No response to that text. Slowly our communication turned to just checking in that the other person was alive. And then the messages essentially stopped. As did the phone calls. As did the visits. Beyond two birthday celebrations where I saw them in a group setting, we haven’t spoken to each other, checked in, or seen each other in almost two months.
While two months of little communication with a friend might be perfectly normal for some of you, let me tell you all that two months of nearly no communication with one of my friends, one of my closest friends, is rather insane. One of my closest friends was a Peace Corps Volunteer in a remote village in Zambia and even we didn’t go two months without communication.
Anyway, lately I’ve been wondering if there’s another element to all of this. I’ve spent time with their relatives and with other friends of ours but not them. Somewhere along the way, probably after the umpteenth text message that wasn’t acknowledged, I started to think that they may not care to know about my day-to-day or might not be interested in exploring the cool things that the DC area has to offer. So I’ve stopped texting them. I haven’t felt inclined to make a phone call, either.
But that doesn’t mean that I’ll ignore their messages or phone calls if they were to reach out.
Backwards way of thinking? Probably. Stubbornness? Probably not. Relationships will naturally have a give and take. Sometimes one person may need to be supported, other times they may need to be the supporter. But, for the most part, healthy relationships need the balance. It feels that there has always been a undertone of imbalance between us; perhaps this lack of communication is allowing us to rebalance as individuals or is allowing us to adjust the relationship to each other.
Through all of this, I have felt such a deep love for the people in my life – especially my soul-college friends. We’re all going through life together, allowing each other to jump from lily pad to bank and back to a new lily pad and always feeling like we are still an army of frogs.

Some of these friends have gone back to school, others have entered new relationships. Some have moved, others are feeling the itch to move. I see some weekly, others a few times a month. Regardless of where we all are in our lives, there has been this warm feeling of community, shelter, and family with these people.     

Who are your sheltering trees?