I came across a lone tear sheltering underneath the lime tree. The dry ground, perhaps recognizing its scarlet R, refused the sip. “Who am I to welcome your banished children?” she asked. “This is your shard. Your ointment, should you risk the pain to find reunion.” I turned to Rejection, took her in my palms, and carried her to the sitting place. Where the tears that resist anesthesia flow freely. Where Rejection becomes Reunion. Where red stains wash away and two meld into one in a blue embrace.
This shell windchime was so tangled it was nearly impossible to remove it from the overgrown walls of the meditation garden. I spent some time, day after day, untangling the strings until they flowed.
One day, it struck me that they rested, suspended, just above a stone face that was also left in the garden. From that moment on, I saw them as tears.
A friend of mine once told me, as he moved back and forth in his dated rocking chair, “We create peaceful spaces because we need them.” He referred to himself. “I wouldn’t have this chair here if I didn’t feel the need to rock myself from time to time. It soothes my anxiety.”
For nearly two years now, I’ve enjoyed the gift of the meditation garden in our backyard. I’ve turned to it time and time again. Sometimes, out of a ritual for connection. Other times, because it helps to soothe me. It’s where I find my breath on the days my pulse has chased it away.
I don’t know why the previous owner built it, but I do believe it served her in some way. Either it helped to soothe her nerves or it helped to hold her sadness. Likely both. She left clues that it was both.
Sometimes emotions feel so big, that it helps to have a place to hold us. Or even a place to hang our feelings outside of ourselves. To look at them as if they were some tangible, controllable thing. Like a strand of shells tethered to a bush whose roots have grown deeply and strongly into the earth. In this place, butterflies can visit, but without the effect of growing—unintentionally—into a tornado or some other force that feels as though it may destroy us.
Since this shell windchime was discovered by our pandemic puppy, its pieces have been dispersed. I find them from time to time, but I walk by them. Sometimes thinking it’s too late to string them together. And other times reminding myself to search for the fishing wire and a drill. It wouldn’t be hard. To reconnect.
No longer suspended. No longer tethered. They’ve been released in a way. And it seems a suitable metaphor for where I am today.
My tears flow at random times. Sometimes, when I get a glimpse of the news, here and there. The slaughter of children in Uvalde. The war in Ukraine. That’s enough. Yet there’s more. A surging virus. An emerging virus. The drought in my backyard. The heat in India. I feel the sadness of being so far away from friends and family. I feel the tug to hug one of my boys who is sick with covid. And I can’t because I am isolating with the one—at greater risk—without it.
It is time to gather my tears. To hold them. To string them together. To invite them back into my sitting place. It’s time to move from scattered to centered. In my pain.
Not-feeling is so convenient. But the cost is too high.
I get glimpses of it from the news. Here. And there.
The path to healing is through feeling.
Some things take longer, deeper work to process, right? I feel like I need three years of peace, love and good news to recover some of my mental real estate these days!
You take us all there with your writing, and it soothes. Sweet remote hugs to all of us.