John O'Donohue says:
"In everyone's life there is a great need for an Anam Cara, a soul friend. In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of acquaintance fall away. You can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person's soul.
A way of explaining friendship is that between two people friendship awakened. It wasn't manufactured or produced or programmed, but it awakened between them in their meeting. It was almost as if an ancient affinity that was latent in their spirit comes awake and comes alive, and that each is joined in an ancient way with a friend of their soul. People say that friends are made. I don't think friends are made at all, but rather discovered. If you look back along your life, you will see that at the crucial thresholds, different people were sent to you to help you acknowledge what was going on, to recognize your own responsibility, and to bring you over thresholds. The most creative growth points in our inner journey are all due to the assistance, graciousness and surprise that friendship brings.
Friendship has a secret logic and a secret destiny. Something that's startling about one's friends is that the first meeting was so contingent and so seemingly accidental; and yet, if you look back now, your life would be unimaginable without the friends who have helped to shape you and give birth to your soul. To put it more pictorially still, it's utterly fascinating to me that no human person ever sees their own face. We look in mirrors and we have images, but we never see our own faces. And we never see our own bodies fully either. A friend is a true mirror in which we begin to get some little glimpse of who we are and the immensity that we carry - and that sometimes haunts us. Friendship is the shelter; and it's not a complacent shelter but a shelter that settles some primal restlessness down within us. It liberates us to get into the dance of our own life."
