Where do tears go?
Cape weed corpses and clovers with love hearts.
A few decades ago I had an idea to write a children’s book about where all our odd socks end up.
Some of them would’ve been sad and wet somewhere, perhaps in a puddle or the corner of a public pool. But mostly, I pictured them having a party. I wanted to draw bright colours and patterns dancing around having found each other; matched in their shared oddity.
I still like to think there is a dance floor of single socks somewhere.
Speaking of singledom, I’ve been crying for a week; the aftershock of my marriage ending still reverberating through my nervous system. The non-linear nature of grief hit me like a wave out of nowhere, and my fucking god I am getting good at being thrown around by these tides.
I welcome grief’s audacity to reorganise my life, without permission, but with great wisdom. Trusting the process doesn’t make it less painful, but I do believe in the rewards of the internal-composting that comes with tears of grief.
However, tears themselves aren’t tangible enough to compost, and I’ve been wondering, where do tears go?
Soaked into a sleeve, on a tissue that gets thrown on the fire, or evaporated directly from my cheeks – I don’t think they disappear into thin air, I think they become air itself.
I am transported back to a poem I wrote whilst deep in climate grief a few years ago:
I have a feeling that Mother Ocean welcomes our tears into her rising seas, with the knowledge that tears hold the medicine of transformation and connection.
Patiently, she will hold our tears and our grief while we weep over our destruction and pollution of her. She knows that through release comes realisation and perspective.
She knows she will be seen – through teary eyes – in a new light. And a new darkness. She knows, if she holds us gently and fiercely and long enough, we will eventually learn to hold her in return.
When our tears rise, we can offer them back into the sea, or back onto the Earth – where they rejoin the water cycles and ecosystems, and rejoice in being home among their kin.
As united tears rejoice, I am reminded of the sock party.
While I am momentarily heavy with grief again (the feeling of needing to sit down immeasurably) there is also a generous slice of me that feels really fucking strong and stable. The bigger identity of me, can hold the little identities of me who are lost.
I found this note in my phone, I don’t remember writing it:
I have asked myself to hold this much
and I’ve never done it before.
I’m not scared.
I know I have the strength to hold it,
even if just for a moment.
There are good, juicy, extraordinary things in my life too. Endless greens from the garden, my work is so fulfilling, fireside chats with friends, unexpected sex in a beanbag. My one-year-old landmate handed me five eggs today, one by one, with glee, pointing at the chickens to tell me where they had come from.
I share an acre of land with a family, and we have a lot of lawn to maintain. There’s a funny ritual that has developed: someone will go around with a hori hori and dig up the cape weed, leaving it upturned on the grass to be picked up by someone else, days or weeks later.
The underside of the leaves is much lighter in contrast to the grass, and it sits like a corpse making itself known before it gets thrown into the weed pile naughty corner.
There is something that delights me about this process. It’s communal, kooky, and perhaps my ego gets a little thrilled at the momentary illusion of human domination over what I have ironically labelled as a coloniser.
Another lawn-derived delight was my discovery of clovers with red love hearts on them. This shit alters my brain chemistry. I swooned and cried with pleasure and the remembrance of how brilliant and big Mother Nature is in its audacity to produce such niche beauty.
I can deduce that tears of beauty end up in the same place as tears of pain. The mechanism and the end place is the same, but the feeling of them flowing downstream to where my river body meets the ocean of my life – is different.
I think it’s different. Yes, it’s different, and yet there is something universal in it too.
Hello, welcome if you’re new here. I publish a piece each month on the full moon – a reflection of inner and outer happenings. I love my work in business for good, philanthropy and regenerative leadership, and I want to write about it more soon. I have heaps of cool shit to share. But for now, my emotional world is asking for priority…
Here for all the waves of the grief journey x
The notion of tears returning to the water cycle is the freshest and most blessed thing I've read for yonks. How you roll with grief and surface with beauty is just... wow x