Tears
Photo: Stephen Victor
I heard a short story, whether real or apocryphal who knows. It went like this: A woman whose circumstance and those of her community were extraordinarily challenging was asked why are you so happy. Her response was because I cry so much.
This morning I cried and cried—missing my late wife. I looked to identify what prompted the emotion. I checked the calendar. Today would have been her birthday.
Though the majority of us attend little to the unseen media we exist within, I refer to it as energy or energy fields. Affectionately I call it the Mystery. Energy itself is memory. It stores experience. Our own and others’. The greater the emotional intensity of experience, dreaded or desired, the more intense the stored past experiential content: it is present in the energy around us, here and now.
Places and locations and borders of things, and calendar dates, accumulate and store quantities of energy rendering them more easily perceptible. My sense of loss and my associated sadness, though prompted outside my Awareness, are very present this morning. My crying released my response to this date’s content, changed me, changed my energy and body chemistry. I feel greater ease. Lighter. Happier.
Consider the story of the happy woman in light of this story: A person repeatedly asked herself Why am I so unhappy? Why am I so unhappy? An insightful other responded saying it is because all you do is think of yourself and there is no self.
If there are truths, that answer may point to one of them. However, in the here and now in a practical sense, unhappiness may well ensue from content stored in the energy we have become inured to whether carried within ourselves or resident in the places and locations and borders and dates we frequent or inhabit.
Is it time to return to our senses? To inhabit and live in our body again. To know and sense our body’s sensory experience and allow ourselves to directly experience our experience? To give our selves over to Life’s flow? The one our body knows? The experiential flow that will then inform our intellect via the Wisdom of direct experience?
A long time ago I watched my brother instructing his young daughter to stop crying—it’s not to be done… Hmm?
