About Friendship – August 2025

❤️ ‘A Friend is a gift, we give ourselves.’ ❤️ ~ author unknown

August is the month of vacation, of having free time to spend with friends, of reconnecting with the people we love and who are important to us.

This August, I decided to talk about Friendship and being a Friend.  I asked my friend Diane Craig, from Minnesota U.S.A., what friendship means to her.  Here is our conversation:

Diane, what does friendship mean to you?

I believe friendship is a very important part of a healthy and fulfilling life. I follow this motto from my childhood: Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver, and the other is gold. Good friends help each other, they support each other, they listen to each other, and sometimes they do or create wonderful things together. A great friendship for me is mutually beneficial and balanced, with a great deal of positive energy, love, respect, and caring.

How do you cultivate your friendships? 

I make friends when I meet people who I am able to connect with. Sometimes they are friends of other friends, sometimes they are found in a class or course that I am taking, and sometimes they are from work or they live in the neighborhood. Usually it is someone who is easy for me to talk to, and often we end up doing an activity or project together.

What efforts do you make to keep your friendships alive? 

Diane & Vicky’s book

Once I have a mutually beneficial and positive friendship, I often spend time with my friends, talking or doing an activity together. I like to golf, hike, or bike with some of my friends, and play board games with other friends.

My former reading teacher colleague Vicky, and I spent a great deal of time on Zoom for the last 3 years, creating poems and passages for reading practice for novice readers. Teaching reading and helping children learn has always been important to me, and my friend Vicki and I collaborated well because we both feel the same way. We love to help children become successful readers- it brings us great joy.

The link on ‘Teachers Pay Teachers’ is here.

It was fun creating together. We also wrote a book called Tips for Reading Tutors:  Supporting Reading Learners.  We just recently got it published on Amazon at the following link here.

Diane and Vicky’s book.

How do you know if someone is ‘worthy of’ your friendship?

Everyone I meet is a friend, until they prove otherwise. Even then, I am still friendly and polite to most people, and try not to be judgmental to others. I believe we do unto others as we would have others do unto us.

For you – for someone to be a good friend to you, do you have your own ‘friendship test’?

I do not have an official friendship test. I find it easiest to be friends with people who are genuine and honest whether with me or not with me. I do not enjoy being with someone who is being phoney or fake or backstabbing.

Thank you Diane!

I cherish you as my friend.

xx Roza

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Diane and I met in 2022, at the Year of Miracle program.  We met every two weeks in 2022, as part of our miracle group meetings that year.  We later extended our meetings into another year and another.  Diane and I we co create together on line from time to time and I cherish Diane’s friendship.

’Show me your friends and I tell you who you are.”

Here is a link to a Polish language version of this post

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N E W!   BOOK CLUB on line:

I have 3 spots available for a book club starting this September, 2025.  We’ll be reading a book, by Julia Cameron ‘The Prosperous Heart:  creating a life of “enough”’.   Please contact me if you would like to join!  Check out here for more info.