Tears

Monday, March 02, 2009 

The Dagara have a beautiful teaching about tears. In their world view, the salt of the tears represents the stories we no longer need or want to hold and the water carries the energy of healing those voids left when the stories are released. Another cancellation. Another disappointment. I know in some future now, I will look back and wonder why I wasted time feeling this way, but in the here and now I hurt. A kind of hurt that sucks at me feet and wants only to take me under. Not the sharp clear pain from a knife’s edge, but a pain like being dragged down some lonely gravel road behind a ’57 Chevy blaring Elvis. No one around to witness. No one around to hear. No one around to help.  Yet, I welcome the hot scraping pain because it lts me know that somewhere under the blankness I am still alive. Alive enough to hurt like this. And that recognition brings the tears. It starts with a hot burning just behind the retinas, followed by the inability to swallow – not one blessed thing. As if I am full to breaking. The snot starts and my face contorts in the pain of the moment. There is a momentary pooling, then the overflow and eventually the chaotic restless path of the tears.  I have always admired women who could cry beautifully – donna reed, Annette benning. Their faces never blotch or contort. The tears merely pool in their eyes and hang there defying the laws of quantum physics forever until they slide down their max factored cheeks. I don’t know how they do this. My body only knows one way to cry – contracted, blotchy twisted and all out.  I have been thinking a lot about tears about crying. It seems the last six months they are my close companion – ever at the ready. Spring up at work, as I try to sleep, while I wait in line at the store, when I am having lunch with a friend. I have cried more in the last six months than in the 47 years before . Those years are marked by a stoic kind of silence devoid of any tears. Not that there hasn’t been plenty of reasons for tears, I just haven’t indulged in them.  So why start now? It is more than loving someone who is dying. It is more than watching things spiral out of my control. I hate tears. They were my mother’s weapon of choice, her ultimate weapon of control. I refused to respond to them, just as she refused to see me. they served no purpose. They held no sway over me. I would not be like her. I would not cry. NOT EVER.  I know this is about connecting that sweet emotional part of me to the powerful thinking part. But no one told me it would feel like this. No one explained how I would hurt. No one showed me how to dissolve my stories into the ocean of my tears and let them go.