“Weeping Creates a River”

Weeping creates a river around the boat that carries your soul-life.  Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace new, someplace better.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I’ve always cried a lot.  It’s just something I did, like eating and sleeping.  But I didn’t always understand my tears the way I do now.

Crying was something my mother seemed to understand.  I remember sitting at the kitchen table and her putting a green  bowl with white daisies on it, in front of me to catch my tears.  Sometimes you just have to cry, she said.  And she let me.

My father, like many men, was afraid of my tears.   Because of his reaction to my tears I learned that when I cried people left me alone.   I learned to hide in my tears.  Jon was the first person I ever met who didn’t run from my crying or try to soothe me.

The first time I cried in front of  Jon I was sitting behind the barn at the Old Bedlam Farm.   We were just friends then and it was the second or third time I was there to feed the animals.  I didn’t understand why, but every time I gave the sheep and donkeys hay I would cry.  This time Jon saw me crying.  I expected him to pretend he hadn’t seen me or ask me if I was alright then go away.

But he didn’t, he sat down and waited for me to stop crying.  He said he understood, feeding the animals was such a nurturing thing to do and I had suppressed my nurturing instincts for so long.   It was the first time my tears had opened up a conversation instead of shutting it down.

I was feeding Jon’s animals on the weekends in exchange for the use of one of his barns as a studio.   I cleaned it out and painted it, but I always felt like I washed it as much with my tears as a broom and paintbrush.

It took me a few weeks, going there at night after work,  to make it mine.  I remember crying the whole time.  While I vacuumed, every time I dipped the roller in the paint,  with every brush stroke around the windows panes. I cried as I moved Jon’s furniture out and mine in.  Through it all I cried.  Sometimes silent tears other times,  great big sobs, that would stop me from working for just a little while.

I didn’t understand my tears then, but I accepted them.  I had no choice, I couldn’t stop them.  And as disturbing as it was, it also felt good.  Like I was releasing a lifetime of pent-up pain.

In saying yes to having a studio and making the space mine, I felt like I was coming back to myself.  My tears were also of relief and gratitude.  I had finally  landed after so many years of not being able to take what I really wanted and be who I really was.

I didn’t know at the time that my tears were transporting me, as Este’s writes,  but that’s exactly what was happening.   I was letting go of a life long burden, and making space for my new life to begin.  I was crying the river that would get me from one place to another. To the life I have now, filled with love and creativity and a strong sense of self.

I cry easily now and without excuse or embarrassment.  I no longer cry to scare people away, I cry because it’s part of how I express myself.  Holding back tears is actually painful but letting them flow is not only a cleansing release, but a means of movement.  The first step in a new direction.

I remember  when I was a kid  once my father tried to get me to stop crying by telling me that I would never get a boyfriend if I cried a lot.  In one of my rare outbursts I told him that I would find someone who didn’t care that I cried.  Jon often tells me he loves me a little more each time I cry.  Seems my tears led me to that someone.