08/26/2026
I’ve always been able to cry at the drop of a hat, at a pretty sunset, at a slight offense or tone of voice, at a story on the news or in a book or even sometimes just to move some unknown feeling up and out of my body because I feel some foreign, uncomfortable emotion settling in and getting too comfortable in my bones. I’ve always been called overly sensitive and I know I feel a lot, both good and bad. It has always made people uncomfortable especially because I can’t always eloquently explain why I’m crying. Sometimes I don’t know.
I heard a story once about how in many ancient cultures there were women who were designated mourners or wailers whose job it was to cry at funerals, wakes and sorrowful events. They would wail, sob and lead crying circles in a ritual and revered way. I always felt like I missed my calling in that way. The act of crying has always felt like a ritual and I have come to terms with the fact that I don’t always know what the waves of emotion are that wash over me or where they come from. Sometimes the tears are clearly my own: separation from my family, feelings of personal injustice or worry about my future. But frequently they are shed for others, for the world, I cry over forests being clear cut, over children dying in Gaza, over desperate mothers, over a bee that died overnight sleeping in a flower. But I also cry over a perfect Dahlia or the mist rolling over Vermont hills at dawn or a delicious tomato. I feel it all deeply.
And maybe what has saved my sanity is my ability to let it out instead of bottling it. After all what would stagnant salt water and pain do to my insides over time? It just always felt better to let it out. So I honor whatever it may be with a few tears and get back to work. It has come to feel like important work to shed a few tears each day, my offering to a beautifully aching world.
But the past year, since my father passed, I have found that the tears have not flowed as readily. I thought maybe I was fresh out, dried up, or less likely, healed. But still I have felt the need to move emotions for fear of them getting caught where they were never meant to stay. So I’ve been trail running, and leaping and squatting and dancing: stretching fascia and tissue and tendon any chance I can. Shaking loose emotions and allowing those tears to wash over and bathe my joints and internal organs like an emotional baptism. And I draw more and I write more. And I dance. I dance wildly in the woods and in the garden and first thing in the morning under the sparkling sun taking care not to kick over my cup of tea. And I’ve been singing. I’ve been singing to the ducks while I’m harvesting in the garden and to Adam when he is falling asleep or on long car rides and I even sang to a telemarketer yesterday instead of telling him to shove it. I absent mindedly picked up the call in the garden and listened briefly to his spiel before unexpectedly breaking into a song at full volume. When I stopped feeling awkward and surprised at myself, he asked me to “sing another one” so I did and then he paused for awhile and said in a thick accent “congratulations ma’am you have a beautiful voice, have a good day.” and hung up. And I felt the happy tears well up then but instead they came out as laughter. So much laughter that I fell on the ground.
I have still felt the tears moving in me like the ebb and flow of the tide but they are not coming out the same that they once were. But there have been rituals to replace the tears. Good rituals. Gentle rituals. When I find the poor bee curled up in the flower I now write it a poem, and when I have to walk away from something that is no longer meant for me, I now stretch up tall and proud and make my voice deeper until I can smooth out the shaking. And when I see a perfect Dahlia I make a bouquet or mix watercolors to drip messily on paper in its honor. Or if a deep, dark memory unearths itself, I spill it out in hot, angry words on paper and burn it to embers. And when Dolly died yesterday I sang and sang and sang. But I didn’t cry.
But today I woke up and felt the familiar pinch at the corner of my eyes and deep in my heart. Today I felt the change as we enter the twilight of the year when the late summer insects start their rhythmic buzzing melody in the goldenrod like a meditative dirge sung to usher the garden into the afterlife. Today, as the gateway of my fathers death is approaching and I feel more than ever the weight and strain of my remaining family relationships, I feel a deep aching pain that no song or dance seems to honor. I feel the frustration and guilt as these relationships fail to thrive and eventually wither and drop like neglected, overripe fruit falling to the ground. So much sweet potential wasted. And I tell myself we will tend to them better next summer. Next summer there is a chance.
And it’s true. The seeds buried under the rotting fruit have already begun to swell and burst open and plant themselves under the rich loamy compost of this years wasted potential. Naively excited to become next years harvest.
But despite the hope, despite the promise. The tears still came. Today they finally came. And I had forgotten how much I missed them. And maybe it was over Dolly, but I think it is over all of it: Dolly and my dad and the bee and the dahlias and all of the sunsets.
