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After my post, Would You Like You as a Friend? my friend Cheryl Harvey Hill shared this with me. I found it so beautiful I asked if I could share it with my readers. Cheryl is a very special person who I’ve mentioned before and will have her interview here one day. Her mom taught her some lessons full of wisdom and she has lived them fully!

For my entire life, my mother has been tossing clichés my way and even when you think you aren’t paying attention, those things tend to find a place in your brain and stay there. Like every mother, when she wanted my undivided attention, she would address me by my first and middle name: “Cheryl Ann, ‘birds of a feather’ really DO ‘flock together,’ she would sternly emphasize, “and you WILL be judged by the company you keep.”

But one of the most profound things she ever taught me was that if I ever wanted to know what kind of person I was, I only needed to look around me at the people who call me friend.

Yesterday was not a good day for me, starting at what we call in the Army, “o dark thirty,” (which translates in civilian jargon as “too damn early”). I spent half my day at the hospital clinic. Nothing serious, just “routine/annual lab work” but I was hating life and feeling pretty betrayed by the powers that be; feeling sorry for myself that this invasive body jabbing, needle poking, tethered to oxygen 24/7 was now, absurdly, considered “routine.” I went to bed last night feeling exhausted, depleted and PLUCKED! If I was one of those “birds of a feather,” I felt like the flock flew south and left me in the cold.

Then this morning I turned on my computer and as I read through the e-mails that were waiting there, I had an epiphany of sorts. I have the most amazing, incredible, talented, beautiful, fascinating [insert at least 500 other positive adjectives here] friends; some of them have been in my life for more than fifty years. They are, without exception, kind souls with high morals. If my friends are, as my mother so eloquently stated all those years ago, “a reflection of who I am,” I am so empowered by that thought. I am feeling pretty impressed with myself right now and judging by the folks who call me “friend,” I have every right to be.

I may have molted a bit in the last decade, my days of strutting like a peacock are passed, and I may not be able to shake the ole tail feathers the way I once could but, thanks to the inspiration of my friends, I still catch an occasional up draft and soar like an eagle with the best of them.

So this blog post is dedicated to all the beautiful souls who refer to me as their friend. I am humbled, proud and grateful. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
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Note from Daylle: Start looking at your own friends. Are they a reflection of who you WANT to be. If so, rejoice and count each blessing. If not, work on being the kind of friend you want in your life.

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