Avian Umbrage
The promises we make to our friends
Yesterday I cleaned and refilled the two hummingbird feeders in my yard. The water and sugar mixture that fills them was still cooling, so I kept the feeders in the house. It was a sunny day, and I was repotting some houseplants when I saw a hummingbird flying around the spot where the feeder normally is. The hummingbird had deep red coloring, like a splotch of blood on its chest, and iridescent green on its back. And it was pissed.
They are expert flyers, and it swiftly passed through every quadrant of the space where the feeder usually hung. Then it went to the location of the other feeder, also empty, and traced the same urgent path through the space under the tree branch, slicing it with mathematical precision.
Then it turned to face me, treading air, red breast forward, and glared at me with focused avian antipathy. Does it know I am the provider of the nectar? And did it consider me derelict in my duty? It certainly seemed that way.
Yes, I am a person who speaks to animals, and I tried to explain in a calm voice that the feeders would be back shortly, with fresh nectar. Which I know is ridiculous. The feeders were up within the hour, and I didn’t see any more hummingbirds, angry or not.
The bird had an expectation that the source of food in my yard would be present consistently. What had been would stay the same. And I’ve been thinking about the way I do that with people.
How do we handle it when friends change?
A person I have known for years occupies a certain place in my understanding. This patch of emotional real estate holds our shared experiences, what I know about them, maybe even a stockpile of old resentments or wariness, or deep gratitude or, usually, some combination of the two.
I am more likely to forgive someone who has treated me with love, generosity and loyalty in the past. Even though I dislike analogies rooted in capitalism, I do think of these historical positives as social capital. People who have treated me well, or shown up in difficult times, have a storehouse of forbearance for the inevitable scuffs and discomforts of relationship. The same applies to communities.
When a relationship is overdrawn, when the expenditure of time and effort is mismatched, when the emotional energy to process the hurts and disappointments outweighs anything I have received over the span of the relationship, then it’s a signal to me that I might want to reconsider the effort and time I’m investing for little return.
Change in individuals and how they relate is inevitable. I am constantly changing. I learn new things, grow in awareness, change my work, my spiritual practice, my art. My closest friends also evolve. It’s not about preserving the status quo. I have seen friends take up and then jettison sobriety, sexual identity and vocations in their respective evolutions. If it makes moral sense to them, I’m curious about it, and most of my close friendships have the tensile strength to adapt over time, as long as we’re not traveling down roads which starkly diverge.
Years ago, I had a friend who was in law enforcement. He lied quite easily in his work. “How do you tell if a cop is lying?” he said to me once as we sat at a booth in a diner. “Their lips are moving.” He didn’t lie to me, at least I didn’t think he did. I noticed the lack of congruence in our moral framework around lying, but there were other areas of congruence, like similar spiritual beliefs. I was young. I thought that because he sent me cassette tapes of his pastor’s sermons we shared similar values.
After about a decade of friendship, he moved from lying to unethical behavior I couldn’t tolerate. We evolved, but we evolved apart. He moved down the road of mendacity for selfish gain, justifying larger and larger deceits until the distance between us was insurmountable.
The Friend Bullseye
I think of relationships as falling somewhere inside a series of concentric circles. In the out circles are friends from work, friends of the road, people I am in community with. They matter, I value them and our relationships, but the bonds are weaker. Very few people are in the center or the circle, the bullseye. And those that get there tend to stay there.
The second set of concentric circles are the layers of the individual relationship itself. My closest relationships have a core, and when the integrity of the core is maintained, the relationship flourishes.
A friend with a different moral framework than I may betray his spouse, but if he doesn’t betray our relationship, if that core integrity stays intact, we can stay friends. This isn’t to say that I won’t name the betrayal, or call out the disconnect in our moral frameworks. That phase in his life may not be our closest. But if he evolves to a different set of actions or understanding, it is easier for us to pick up again.
If, however, a friend violates that core, it is harder to come back. If, using the example of the unfaithful spouse friend, he lies to me about his infidelity, that would violate the core. Because lying to me is always a bad thing. It’s my bad thing, not everyone else’s, but being lied to is really hard for me to get past.
Group Promises
I have a clear sense of what the guidelines are for residence in that core. I use the phrase Group Agreements when I’m working with clients, but a friend of mine said she tried the phrase “Group Promises” with a gathering of autistic kids, because that made more sense to them. Promising to treat the people in your group in certain, agreed upon ways felt more important to them than just agreeing. You can agree and ignore, but if you promise, you have an emotional commitment.
I love that idea, and I think our close relationships entail a set of Friend Promises, whether they are stated or not. With romantic and family relationships you may need to articulate them more explicitly. As CS Lewis said, friends tend to walk side by side into the world and don’t talk as much about their relationship whereas lovers tend to sit facing each other and are more likely to talk about their relationship. Certainly women do this, in romantic relationships with one another or with men.
Conveying to a lover or family member what makes you feel safe, cared for, and connected, can be the start of those Promises. Rolling out your personal map and pointing out the danger zones, the “There be Dragons” of our emotional ecosystem can also help a partner understand where the sore spots are.
This is one of the central tenets of attachment theory, providing your partner with an owner’s manual of how you work. I prefer the analogy of a map, but the premise is the same. Also implicit is that if you tell a partner what to do and what to avoid to protect you emotionally, they will do and avoid said things as much as possible and when they cannot, they will own it and try to do it differently next time.
To me, if I convey to another person what kind of Friend Promises I need – and it should be a short list – and I understand theirs, and we promise to do them, then we have a very strong core upon which to build a lasting connection.
I have friendships with very strong connections where we never had a discussion about the Friend Promises, but we both simply paid attention and understood them and now we guard them zealously. And that is such a gift, to know people who pay attention. To be a person who pays attention.
It is unsettling when key relationships shift, for whatever reason. Often the shifts are beyond our control – a move, an illness, any change in circumstances where a friend has less time or bandwidth for a while. Sometimes the shift is closer to the core; a hurt, a violation of the Friend Promises, one person moving down a darker road.
I have to fight a tendency not to fly around frantically trying to recapture what I assumed would always be there, because that is not how life, people or relationships work. I certainly don’t need to be glaring at the friend for not providing what I want on tap when I expect it.
When I saw the pissed off hummingbird in my backyard, hovering with umbrage in front of me, I thought with some bemusement that my yard also has flowers the hummingbird could get food from, there are multiple sources of nourishment in my yard and my neighbors’.
It might not be as easy as sticking a long beak into a tray and slurping up as much high octane nectar as you want. But no bird is starving in my neighborhood, even in the deepest winter. And the absence was temporary. As I write this, the feeder outside my office window is like a train station, bird after bird perching and drinking from the little yellow plastic flowers at the base. They are territorial and don’t share, the greedy birds. There is space for six of them, but I’ve never seen more than one at a time, and they fight over it.
I have many friends, many connections, multiple communities, a whole garden available to me. Plenty comes and goes, but there is no scarcity. We are all, including myself, fallible, inexpert, often unskillful people. We are living in a time of crushing social and political oppression. Patience and compassion, for myself and others, making sure I am providing what nourishment I can to my people while forgiving them and myself for our limitations, feels like the spiritual assignment of this season.