Good Morning!  You know what it’s like when you run into an old friend?  Someone with whom you really connected but haven’t seen in a long time, and you suddenly bump into each other on the street or in a café, and it’s as though the intervening time just disappears?

Well, that happened to me this morning, with someone I’ve never met.  Not physically, anyway.  Now some people would say that sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. have redefined the word ‘friend’, to the point where we now have friends, and ‘friends’.  If someone reads your work or connects with you electronically, they become your ‘friend’, at least online.  Apparently in the Facebook world one can have a million ‘friends’ or more.  That’s a lot of Christmas cards  But friendship, at least to me, is more than that.  Friendship involves a sense of connection, of shared ideas, a similar way of looking at the world.  Friends make us feel better about ourselves, and uplift the way we look at the world.  To steal a line from ‘Beaches’, friends are the wind beneath our wings.

Samantha Standish is a friend in that sense to me, although we’ve never met, and she may or may not feel the same way.  I first encountered her writings through the NewWorldView site (now mostly defunct, but there are still some wonderful archives there) where she had a blog.  I found that I loved reading her posts, and I felt a sense of connection with her view of the world that I’ve shared with few others.  I felt the same sense of connection with Tom Brown nearly thirty years ago when I read his first two books, ‘The Tracker’ and ‘The Search’.  Anyway, I digress.

Yesterday I wrote about the ‘Future Me‘ site, and this morning I had two ‘Future Me’ posts show up in my Inbox from last year.  I enjoy receiving these posts from myself; sometimes I find a distinct contrast with who I used to be, and often I find a ‘new’ perspective on something I’ve been chewing on lately.  Well, in the first post I read this morning, included in my usual ramblings was a post from Samantha’s NWV blog, called ‘Economic Whoas!’  I haven’t thought about Samantha in a while, but re-reading what she wrote was like a breath of fresh air for me.  So (Google is your friend here), I thought I’d see if I could find her online, and much to my delight, I did!

So, enough of my rambling, take the opportunity to go and see what I’m talking about for yourself.  And Samantha, if you find your way here, my thanks for sharing your view of the world!  I consider you a friend (not just a ‘friend’), and I send you hugs in return!!

Love,

Mike.

Samantha’s Home Page

Samantha’s Blog

Hypno-yesity

I Am Pollyanna

The Power to Flower