I grew up with the “if you don’t stop crying I will give you something to cry about” style of parenting. I am beyond needing to judge that. I had parents who rarely allowed themselves to cry, and couldn’t abide by seeing their children cry either. I know that the cry-aversion was then amped up by being born male. “Big boys don’t cry.” Regardless.
Trying to apply those directives was for years nothing less than excruciating. Male or not I was born with a sensitive heart that had direct access to my tear ducts. My natural response was to cry when I was happy, cry when I was sad, cry when I witnessed any type of heroism or transcendence. Though I tried myriad ways to suppress those inclinations my attempts only led to a temporary deadening of not only those feelings, but all feelings in the emotional spectrum. For me to deeply feel was to frequently be led to tears. When I attempted to mitigate that impulse I paid a huge energetic price. Life became gray. I lost access to compassion, to joy, and to deeper levels of love. In disconnecting from my natural emotional language I lost the power of felt connection. I disengaged. I unplugged. Though there was an illusion of safety in that there was also a feeling of death.
I am grateful today to allow full access to my heart-centered response to life. That response includes a fair amount of tears. To keep it real with you my readers it also includes a not so infrequent sob. Alright, even an occasional wail. I am a big boy AND I cry. And whether I choose to cry or not in any given circumstance there seems to be no shortage in life of things to cry about. And I have found that the ability to be able to live deeply enough to allow for a full and even holy-water response to life is a gift beyond measure. It is evidence to me that I am alive and that I am fully engaged. That life is touching me and I am allowing it to do so. My tears are evidence that my heart is open and my compassion is flowing. To live in a world or guns, violence, terrorism, brutality, bigotry, and inequality brings me to tears. I don’t personally aspire to be deadened to it or disengaged from it. I know it is the realm of the relative, but it is that realm that I as a human am a part of. I watch the things happening in our world and my sensitive heart hurts. Tears come to my eyes as droplets of caring. Sometimes I even just have to let myself ugly cry. And sometimes it is beauty that brings about an almost equal torrent.
As I look at this world today I feel as if we as cosmic citizens need to allow for a full and unedited collective wail. A wail that is loud and messy and unrestrained. I feel as if it would go a long way to acknowledging and so healing the collective pain we have tried to deaden and endure. Our separation from our deeper selves, from our collective pain, from our common humanity needs to be grieved. It’s either that or we will continue to act out on the rage that comes from the inability to be with our sadness.
What would it be like to allow for a good, long, unsuppressed, collective wail? The whole of the human family joining to cry our substantial grief and to finally give way to the sadness that has accumulated for centuries? How might we hold each other in the process? What might be available on the other side?
Peace. Maybe on the other side of the wail there will be peace. The stillness that follows a storm will fall upon our hearts and on our earth. Violence will cease and harmony will prevail.
The thought of such beauty brings me to tears.
