Good Morning Digital Neighbors & Friends! Since this has morphed into a week on friendship, more from the treasure trove of quotes called the Forbes Book of Quotations! Three quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson on this important topic of friendship. Again we don't need many friends but to have none is a lonely path to walk and probably not a mentally healthy one. On to Emerson!

A friend is a person before whom I may think aloud. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only way to have a friend is to be one. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lots of gold here in Mr. Emerson. The freedom to think aloud has become one of the most curtailed realities on the modern age of offense. Thinking aloud will probably earn you an IST label by the nouveau-righteous of cultural-political cult. The Isting of others is less about clarifying or identifying attitudes and more about the ability to silence or dismiss others because their offensive existence. The testing of ideas, the comparison of attitudes or the debating of points is replaced by the dismissal of persons. It makes the whole ignore-malign-imprison-kill process a lot easier down the road.🙊

To think aloud it to open your mind and heart to another. It is to risk potential offending other, being misunderstood or having to further clarify your point if you are actually in a conversation with a person with a capacity for listening (less and less of those among us - one hopes that Locals draws a higher percentage of those with this capacity).

Old friends get you, even when you are stupid. Old friends give you the opportunity to walk about your statement without waiting for the moment to pounce on your error, stupidity or poorly thought moment. Repeated stupidity can lead to the end of the a relationship, one can only suffer so much stupidity before the frustration capacity of good souls is overwhelmed. New friends with patience & think skins are potential old friends in the making. I hope you have old friends, or can find new ones with that capacity. They probably have the greatest potential to help us overcome and grow beyond repeated acts and statements of stupidity. That dance of acceptance and pushing beyond our current limits and attitudes is best accompanied with a friend who loves us as we are but sees the potential we might miss.

Being a friend. Those first people outside the family fold that were welcomed into our lives. Extroverts tend to make them easier, but can often live only at the surface and have shallow friendships. Introverts may not have many friends, but if they have a few they tend to run deeper. Time and vulnerability determine the depth of friendship, you have to spend enough time and be open enough to discuss things beyond the superficial items of the news, entertainment or current culture were we live in a hyper-emotional state of being. Of course the number one risk of vulnerability is oversharing and alienation. You share a bit too much of the darker, WTF side of your story and your friend has that awkward and identifiable moment of silence or look of shock. You hope there is a moment for clarification or further explanation, a good friend will afford you that, but it may be the turn in the relationship that ends it. Once alienation begins, more than like the dissolution of the relationship will follow.

If you demand perfection in persons, you will probably have either no friends and superficial associates that you call friends, but they know nothing of consequence or significance in your story. "Friends" of the passing moment may ease temporary loneliness, but they will not reach that part of our person that we open to very few. We cannot have depth relationships with everyone, but to have none is your life is a poverty. An large number of superficial friends or relationships of limited depth is not a bad thing, it is what brings people together in various associations around hobbies and shared interest. They may never talk person history, the sharing of joys and the revealing of warts, but they have a common interest that satisfies that communal urge in us.

Seems unusually long this morning - I am sure the 25 typos & grammatical errors will become more evident to me when I read this again later. Such is life with my morning babble. BARNS!!

Winter Barn in Maine - Dunno who took it DDG delivers! Happy Thursday my friends!