When Our Tears Feed The World – Dipping Into Light

SELF-CARE … THERE ARE MOMENTS I don’t want to hear those words ever again. Sometimes I hear them as something else I’m failing at, or not doing right or often enough, or, or, or … fill in the blank. However, in a weird way I find it helpful to remember that the self-help industry global market generates between $45 billion and $59 billion per year! In the United States, it’s about $14 billion. Check your bookshelves—it’s likely they are riddled with self-help books.

I find this little piece of trivia helpful because it reminds me how toxic the business of wellness can be. The more chaotic, oppressive, and violent the world becomes, the more I desire the solace of true care. I’m not referring to prayer and meditation, the defaults in spiritual circles.

When I slow down long enough to listen to the whispers of my heart, I frequently am called to one of my true loves—nature. Not just any place in nature, but the places I’ve never been. I get to see life through obscure nature TV shows. I discover the unseen and extraordinary ways life always manages to care for itself and every other creature.

On the latest show I’m watching, I am welcomed into a hidden corner of the Amazon rainforest. Here, there are moments when the air sparkles with wings—bright clusters of butterflies landing gently on the faces of turtles. They’re not attacking, they’re drinking.

Like most every other creature, the butterflies need salt to survive, and the only source in their veiled world comes from tears of the turtles. So they gather around the eyes of these quiet, patient reptiles, sipping their tears as though it were the nectar of flowers. The turtles offer the world what their bodies naturally release, and those tears feed another’s life. The butterflies get what they need. The turtles are unharmed. Life finds a way, a natural caring for itself—through another.

The body remembers what the mind can’t or won’t, and tears say what words cannot while they cleanse and soften us.

There’s an agonizing ache these days that brings so many tears of grief, sorrow, and desolation. Moments, even entire seasons, when I couldn’t stop crying because I had been fully cracked open. In the past I may have seen those tears as weakness, as proof that I’d fallen apart—again. But what if in those moments I am actually feeding the world? What if my tears are carrying salt—truth, tenderness, release—that someone else needs but didn’t know how to ask for? I never heard the butterflies ask.

I’ve sat with friends in grief circles and retreats where one person’s crying opened the door for everyone else. One tear gave permission for a river. There’s always someone who says, “I didn’t know I needed to cry until you did.” That’s how the healing begins—through overflow.

Tears are one of the body’s sacred languages, that sotto voce of the angels, the mystery, the caring. The body remembers what the mind can’t or won’t, and tears say what words cannot while they cleanse and soften us. Like the turtles and butterflies, my tears don’t belong only to me. Maybe that’s why I don’t wipe them away or interrupt another’s tears by handing them a tissue.

When I find myself crying, I imagine I’m part of that rainforest—the quiet turtle and the glistening butterfly that is somewhere nearby and will find nourishment from my release. Sorrow becomes sweetness, and love learns to drink deeply from the tender places that make me gloriously human.