Kindred Spirits
- Natasha Haught Fudge
- Mar 1, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 26, 2021
Have you ever had the pleasure of a kindred spirit? Tom to your Huck, Beth to your Jo March or Anne Shirley to your "bosom friend" Diana?
Carrie
My first kindred spirit was born eight months after me. We know each other because we're family-a fact not wasted on me as a gift from God. My cousin Carrie and I share DNA, sure, but we also share a self. Our love of the same things (storytelling, gymnastics, 90's television) make us great companions but the fact that we also experience the world in the same way make us kindred spirits. This has proved very beneficial to us since we are both a little unusual.
My life would have been very lonely without her.
Not many other twenty year olds willingly spend their free time trying to get the perfect shot in a home video homage to Hitchcock, but we did. Who else was willing to listen to the Beatles and Itzhak Pearlman with me for hours on end? Who else would call me to discuss their shot by shot adaptation of "Crime and Punishment"? The same girls who were teased by their older brothers and had strong feelings about bagel commercials, that's who.
Mini auteurs and a little brother.
One of the perks of having a kindred spirit is having access to someone else's thoughts. Carrie knows I'm screaming inside because we're walking behind someone slow. I know when Carrie's thinking about ice skating routines and not what I'm saying because of the glassy look in her eyes. Through our life we've shared rooms and secrets and college majors. It makes sense that Carrie knows me better than I know myself.
Kindred spirits abound in my family. I'm spoiled.
The best part of our kinship is that we never have to explain ourselves to each other. There has always been a fundamental, unspoken understanding between us. We get each other. Carrie is my platonic soul mate.
Leland
My husband and I like to say "There's no such thing as soul mates but you are my soul mate." I guess we're just the exception to the rule. No big deal.
There isn't enough internet available for me to write out all my sappy feelings about my husband but of course that doesn't necessarily make us kindred spirits. What does? You mean besides being soul mates? Among other things, we are both recluses and hate wearing pants. His last name is Fudge, mine is Haught. We belong together.
Hayley, Mimi, Johanna, Rochelle
My best friends from college and I are also kindred spirits. They help refugees and dress up as Garth from Wayne's World for Halloween amid our "sexy" kittens peers. These incredible women can discuss God and Jurassic Park in the same conversation. They are my people.
My twins sons are kindred spirits and not just because they often share a toilet seat together.
At the same. My boys are special.
So with all this said, I am happy to announce I have found yet another kindred spirit. Hooray for me! There's not a limit on how many kindred spirits you get, right?
Except for the Body
Except for the body
of someone you love,
including all its expressions
in privacy and in public,
trees, I think
are the most beautiful
forms of the earth.
Though, admittedly,
if this were a contest,
the trees would come in
an extremely distant second.
-Mary Oliver
Like a philistine I knew little of Mary Oliver's work until her recent passing. I came across several written tributes of her work and was blown away by her poetry. It wasn't just that she wrote gorgeous poems that made me want to tear my hair out from their seemingly effortlessness. Nor was it that her wonderment of the natural world mirrors my own. No, when I read her poems I find myself reading what I have tried so often to write myself. It's like she has translated my thoughts and feelings onto paper, only better written. She is the writer I want to be.
I have been greatly influenced by a handful of writers in my life but never have I read their works and thought "I have tried writing this exact poem". With Mary Oliver, I do and often. She is the better self I aspire to be.
Take a gander at her writing and maybe you'll find a kindred spirit too. You can never have too many.
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