I read Katrina’s beautiful words about the unclear, uncertain path that is writing last night and my tears fell freely. Not eyes welling up with tears. No, these were tears rolling down my faces, unabashed. Full-fledged crying. I wiped my face with the sleeves of my tee shirt but I couldn’t keep up. Tears fell onto the pages of my friend Tracy’s essay, which I was reading for my writing group.
When I pulled myself together enough to look back down at Tracy’s work the page was speckled with the splotches of darkness where my fat tears had fallen. A few words were blurred with the wetness.
I thought about how often tears blur things for me. They blur my vision when my eyes fill with tears for the unexpected, unanticipated reasons that each day – each hour – seems to offer up. They blur words on the page, either literally, as today, or as I read, when the writing of others, in blogs or books, moves me to tears. This happens daily too.
I cry every single day. And those tears cause a blurring at the edges, literally and figuratively, of my life. My world suddenly swims; all at once my view of the light on trees, or the black and white words of a sentence, or the expression on Whit’s face dissolves into a swirl of wet saltwater emotion.
Last year, the tears blurred the white lights on our Christmas tree into streaks of light in a dark room. This happened in a moment when I felt the presence of something far greater than myself. This is a moment I’ve come back to again and again in my head, a moment when I instinctively assumed the posture of prayer, when I felt “infinitely big and infinitesimally small at the same time.” What I don’t know is whether the blurring was a result or a cause of that fleeting, powerful feeling.
There are so many tears in my life. Just as I return to the sea for my metaphors and my meaning, I cry an ocean from my very own eyes. The ocean is inside of me as surely as it is outside. Maybe this internal ocean has something to teach me. Let me learn to sit with it and learn from what I see in the blur.
I think touching the divine is BOTH the cause and the result of acknowledging and opening the ocean within. Our hearts have to be cracked open. And then in the alive stillness, they open even more.
May you feel more and more that you are supported and under-stood by something greater than yourself, something that connects you and carries you as you journey.
Oh dear. I will have to wait to read Katrina’s post til I get home, it seems!
Sitting, waiting, it is all good. Looking at what is right here, right now can calm my seas.
XOXO
C
You cry every day. This amazes and inspires me because it shows that you FEEL. I am currently writing a character into my next novel who is so numb to the word and desperate to feel something. I think many of us, too many of us, probably experience this numbness sometimes. In my estimation, the not feeling and not crying is so much worse than being sensitive and porous to the world…
I’m glad to hear that someone else cries every day…. I seem to cry every day, too, uncontrollably. My eyes will just well up at the most inappropriate moments – at work, standing in line at the grocery store, in the car.. I can’t keep my thoughts from mixing with my emotions, and sometimes its quite embarrassing and annoying, but then again it’s just me, it’s a part of who I am. It’s funny though, because if anyone asked I wouldn’t say I am a crier. I am a weeper. It’s weird, and I’m glad to know I’m not the only one. 🙂
I’m not the only one I know who cries much more easily post-kids. Something in you sometimes gets re-wired. Maybe it’s being tired all the time; but maybe it’s something more, too. A more intense, direct pipeline to empathy.
I used to cry ALL the time and now, maybe every two weeks. So strange. But when I actually let them come, ohhhh, fabulous, cathartic release. I cried so hard today. Hot, huge tears. and now, on the other side, I’ve embraced the peace that waited for me.
xxo
I love how you write that the blur might be a cause of the powerful feeling. Thank you!
” Let me learn to sit with it and learn from what I see in the blur.” Amen.
Sit with my tears. Not fight them, or hurry to dry them, or hide them. Sit with them.
What a friendly thing to do.
What a touching post — thank you for sharing. Tears in some ways are so healing. Also, I checked out Katrina’s blog…it was just what I needed to hear (I recently realized that the intro of one of my manuscripts isn’t going to work and I’ve been trying to be OK with starting again). Many tears.