I went up to the Miller Farm this morning to deliver yet another pair of boots (that must be returned) and to bring a few gummy worms I ran across at the market.

I’ve been away for a week, and I realized this morning how much I missed Moise and his family, we have gotten very close. It was also good to have some space to think about things.

I see how welcome I am, how comfortable I am, how much I love thumb wrestling, and how certain that my friendship with Moise and his family will continue to deepen and grow.

That was very clear to me. We were happy to see each other.

We both have put a lot into this friendship, and it is precious. But we both are very different, and that is difficult.

Moise is working hard on his new home, the walls and roof is almost completely up. He wants to show me what he has done, to give me a tour.

Last night, I deleted all of the recent stories about the friendship on my blog as I weared of getting reams of unwanted advice, amateur (and incompetent) mental health diagnoses, and assumptions that were not true.

Perhaps this is my fault for not being clear.

My love-hate relationship with social media continues.

The medium has replaced all of the  asylums the government took down for the mentally ill years ago. They all have a place to go,  and Facebook is happy to have them, perhaps this is the one decent thing the company has done.  Many seem very drawn to computers and e-mail.

The issue I was facing was not ever simple, as people suggested.

It was not a fight, as people assumed. I was not being asked to go away because I had done something bad. I had done nothing wrong, and nothing wrong was done to me. That is the typical English dynamic. It doesn’t fit the Amish.

I was not being asked to do anything but be sensitive and careful about what I write about people who are religiously and passionately private and who think the devil will eat them alive if they are photoographed too closely.

I have a number of very good friends I never photograph and rarely, if ever, write about.

If that’ s the only issue in a very complex relationship like mine and Moise’s, then we are in pretty good shape.

Friendships are never simple or one-dimensional. In a sense, Moise and I are just being true to our natures and beliefs. Can we tolerate that in one another? So far, so good. But there will always be adjustments and surprises. I have spent a lot of time with my new Amish friends, but there is an awful lot I don’t know aobut them.

Friendships are complicated.

I have one friend who will barely speak to me because I don’t like to talk about my health. The family was happy to see me, and I am happy to see them.

People assume that we had a fight, but we didn’t have a fight. We always see our own reflections in the mirror.

Amish don’t fight. I don’t fight with them.

The question was whether or not two such different people  from such disparate cultures can be close friends. I’m not 100 per cent sure, but I’m pretty sure they can be, that’s as good as it will get for right now.

I was reading an essay on friendship by Seneca, the great Roman philosopher last night and he gave me a lot of things to think about.

“Think long whether a man should be admitted to your friendship,’ he wrote, “and when you have decided he should be, admit him with all of your heart and speak with him as freely as with yourself. If you believe he is loyal you will make him so.”

The problem is really mine, no one else’s. I can’t see inside the souls of other people or speak for them or judge them or make decisions for them. The family seems quite content to me.

It’s not about pictures and words.

This can never be a conventional friendship, but it can be a valuable one, something I can give my heart to, and trust. That’s where I want to go.

I don’t trust easily or often, and I have only given my heart fully to one human being in my life, my wife. Trusting everyone and no one are both wrong, in my mind.

The people I know are almost always at ease or never at ease, and both moods are problematic in their own right. “Bustle,” says Seneca, is not briskness but the agitation of a turbulent mind.

For me, friendship, which has always been difficult in my mind, is a question of coming from the darkness, which I have, and into the light, where I am going.

Seneca quotes Pomponious: “Some people have withdrawn to darkness so deep that they think anything in the light is dim.” Ask nature, advises Seneca, “she will tell you that she created both day and night.”

For me, friendship is all about day and night, as is love or marriage or life itself. To get to the light, you have to also accept the darkness.

The fascinating thing aobut the friendship I  have with Moise is not that we argue,we don’t.

The most interesting thing is while we connect on many levels, we are also still learning to know each other, and what drives us. It is hard to trust someone so different because it is difficult to know them.

This isn’t because they are evil, but because there is so much about them and their beliefs that you just don’t know or understand, or that you don’t yet know.

My bringing boots and gummies this morning was a signal that I want to work it out. The warm and inviting reception I received was a signal in  return.

I’m sorry that so many people think I can’t work this out by myself, so they send me advice that is neither useful or helpful. I can work it out, and I will. I insist on solving my own problems, I don’t write my blog so that I can be told what to do.

I want to learn from my mistakes.

If there is a pattern to my turbulent life in recent years, it is that I am learning to give more and more of my heart away, to my writing, photos, family, the Mansion, the refugees.

It was an unusually wise move for me to just back off for a week or so.

This gives us all a chance to grasp what we mean to one another, and how important it is not to run away, as I have done so often in my life.