When We Cry We Do Not Tear
But When We Weep We Do
Dear Friends and Family,
For several weeks, we have been turning a hermeneutic spiral around the theme of weeping, exploring instinct and intelligence, innocence, and today, touching on the notion of ‘the fall of man’, which I am inclined to see not so much as a fall but as a step not yet fully taken. More on this another time. . .
Before offering today’s reflections, I wish to share a moment from the week with you. On Thursday, I opened the “Stats” page on the backend of my Substack dashboard. I imagined I might gather some insights, hoping, of course, to keep Beyond the Comfort Zone a letter you look forward to every week. I’m not so sure I have more insights!
But something did become clear, and it touched me quite deeply. Many hundreds of you read this newsletter every single week. Hundreds more of you read it almost every week. And hundreds of you pop in from time to time. This is extraordinary. Know that I write to each one of you, and I thank you for joining me Beyond the Comfort Zone.
Ever in gratitude and with love,
Renée
When on those mornings I wake in the hour before the first light of day, I lie in bed and wait. For the first whisper of a bird near or far, I wait. It is always one bird that begins and every day a different one, parting silence as sure as light illuminates the dark. I roll over from fetal fold to my back so that the hollow in my chest can meet the sound that starts there in the puff of a bird’s breast, and I nurse the song of innocence that in these moments recalls my own. In the dark, I do not ask: Is it the bird pulsing or me? We are not yet together alone. No time travels when dark calls unto dark. No space spans beginning to end. Every uttered sound is a groundswell of feeling. And when the afternoon sun parts three days of clouds and touches the green of spring just so, quenching every thirst I did not know I had, something quickens inside my chest, which lifts just a little as a next breath comes yet catches in my throat.
. . .
Your first word was light, and for long you were silent, Rilke said to God.1 Boehme said of that light that it was Love.2 What he meant was that out of the womb of the Great Mother before even the first radiance of being, Being itself squeezed through a vortex of every already anguish, and in yearning and in hurting, and in the joy of finally passing through, Love came to be. And so, Jesus wept. And so, too, did Mary.
A newborn’s cry is a cry from which no mother can turn away.3 Inside that cry is not a single tear.4 Look, and you will see that no infant fresh from the womb can weep. So, while we may say that falling rain may be the sky’s tears in yearning to feel what it is to be green, in its truest sense, to weep must be to have lived—to have experienced being together alone and bear a certain intensity of feeling that this is so. Weeping comes unbidden, unfolding the inner folds of an inner life, a life having experienced the grandeur and tragedy of being.
When we cry, we do not tear but when we weep we do.5 When we cry—the body writhing with pain, churning with fear, or the heart calling out—what surges inside is adrenaline, giving us the ready to fight, flee, freeze, or plead. But when we weep, and tears begin to fall,6 what pours into and out of the cells are those inner messengers that give us over to bonding (oxytocin), lift our mood (serotonin), and relieve our pain (endorphin).7 Inside every tear is an inner answer to joy and delight, yearning and sorrow, wonder and awe, love and loss. In crying, we see the inner desire to live, but in weeping, we come to the immediacy of being touched by the relational fabric of being.
. . .
It is said that the first human tears were tears bidden.8 They came by invocation when any one member of any tribe was torn from life by death. For the early human, life came first and death followed. But for the early Modern human, death came first and life followed.9 This is so still today.
Your second word was man, and fear began, which grips us still, said Rilke to God.10 What he meant was that when came the human in the unfurling of life, and in the unfolding of human ways of being, something changed in the great chain of being. For to fear is to be not taken by death but to live between the bookends of death every day . . . for dust thou art and unto dust though shalt return . . . all the while pretending this can’t be so.
We lost our moorings in the largesse of Life, not because we ate of the fruit. We could say we lost our moorings in the cyclone of a certain kind of thought, which came with the unfolding of Life as expressed through the human. Then thought would, in time, give way to rational thought. For all the blessings rational thought would bring, it ushered in an endless array of trouble. Rational (from ratio) thought cuts everything into pieces and in piecing things apart, separates you and me from the fabric of the world. It makes existence chance and emergent from that which is dead. Rational thought tears us from the fullness of being, which is as much, the fullness of feeling.
And so, tears seem to empty us whole, and in outpouring, we back up to a bedrock of inborn innocence, if for a moment, which could seem strange, I know, since we said that nascence has no tears, having not yet experienced the grandeur and tragedy in living. But what is forgotten in ratio is restored in innocence. In innocence is intimacy. In intimacy is feeling. The unfinished crescendo of living is as much involution as evolution.
Rilke said to God, Are you about to speak again? I do not want your third word.11
I do.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead, 1996), p. 103.
Jacob Boehme, The High and Deep Searching of the Threefold Life of Man According to the Three Principles, trans. John Sparrow (Gorlitz, 1620, online edition: https://www.jacobboehmeonline.com/assets/docs/Threefold_Life_of_Man_print.18693727.pdf).
A lengthy body of neurobiological research evidences common behaviors by mothers and non-mother caregivers elicited by newborn crying. For a recent review, see: Marc H. Bornstein, et al. “Neurobiology of Culturally Common Maternal Responses to Infant Cry,” Pyschological and Cognitive Sciences, 114 (45) E9465-E9473, https://www.pnas.org/syndication/doi/10.1073/pnas.1712022114#sec-2
Not all literatures agree with this assessment. This is, in part, because crying and weeping are often conflated. Some have teased apart the two. See, for instance: C. V. Bellieni, “Meaning and Importance of Weeping,” New Ideas in Psychology, (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2017.06.003
Ibid.
Tears true to feeling and not ‘crocodile tears’ as emotional manipulation.
Bellieni, “Meaning and Importance of Weeping.” Evidence for serotonin production is not as putative. Messmer, 2009, reports on detection of serotonin in tears, “Emotional Tears,” Ophthalmologe, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00347-009-1966-5
Bellieni.
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966).
Rilke, p. 103.
Ibid.
Renee, I love this expansion on your last post. Ever since my experience of weeping that I shared with you in the comments of that post, my life has been continually shifting. The weeping opened something inside and set it free. I love what you stated here, "in weeping, we come to the immediacy of being touched by the relational fabric of being." So true, this is what I felt. Heartened by this web of life, new insights and a fuller awareness of connection became possible. The illusionary walls of trying to hold life together crumbled, there was and is a return to innocence. I love that you brought innocence into this writing. It truly is a gift to read your post as a mirror, a validation to my very profound experience. Thank you!
There is something very intimate about weeping, and it is very internal. There is crying and there is sobbing/weeping. The difference between the two is big for me. When I can truly let go and sob, where the tears are flowing, where my whole body is involved, and where I can hardly catch my breath; it feels so liberating and cleansing and restorative all at the same time. There really is nothing to compare it to. I feel most alive during that act of letting go into the fullness of sobbing. It can be triggered by sorrow, or by being touched by something so poignant, or by something extraordinarily beautiful. It is the world of feeling in its most primal expression. "Inside every tear is an inner answer to joy and delight, yearning and sorrow, wonder and awe, love and loss." I agree that the world of rationality often trumps the world of feeling in this modern world of ours; and the implications of that are staggering. Alexander Lowen, who founded what he called bioenergetics, used to induce weeping in himself at least once everyday. He said that all humanity has a well of grief that is always present, and to weep daily helps us to tap into that grief and to feel the weight and substance of it, and to release the energy of it. This helps us to stay deeply in touch with our internal, feeling world to balance all the time spent in the rational world we tend to inhabit. Here's a poem by Mark Nepo: "I'm not afraid of dying, but of losing those I love. I can't quite imagine a world without them. Like waking to a rip in the sky through which the sun might leave. The only thing that helps is to go below the noise. There, I listen to the same piece of music day after day. I play it over and over until the squirrel in my head stops chewing, and my heart admits it's tired of why. So many things show their beauty when we go quiet. So many truths are present when we look up from under our trouble. To fall below the world, while living in the world, makes us remember that the truth that waits under our opinions, is our home. So tell me, am I home? Are you home? When was the last time you looked up from under your trouble? When will the fugitive we hide inside finally accept that our self-worth was there all along? And what sort of rain will make the seed inside our heart grow?"