Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition.

If you send out goodness from yourself or if you share that which is happy or good within you it will all come back to you multiplied ten thousand times. In the kingdom of love there is no competition there is no possessiveness or control. The more love you give away the more love you will have.

Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you. To lose these now would be to lose yourself.

Every friendship travels at sometime through the black valley of despair. This tests every aspect of your affection. You lose the attraction and the magic. Your sense of each other darkens and your presence is sore. If you can come through this time it can purify with your love and falsity and need will fall away. It will bring you onto new ground where affection can grow again.