it's hard to cry with your mouth full...

Sobs and salad don't mix. I was reminded of this a few days ago as wave after wave of tears tried to make it past The Guardian. I was eating lunch and not doing a very good job of it. Do not cry in front of others. Especially, do not cry in front of parents. Do not reveal to anyone you are having a hard time. Do not show defeat. Crying outloud and with lots of pathos, in front of everyone, with no apologies, is an horrible act of treason against the Family Way. Achtung! Continue eating salad. Swallow hard.

I am not naturally predisposed to being tearful, and I am often confused about why I am actually crying when I do. Maybe only a hyperanalytical person would ask that, but it's important for me to know why I am crying, because it's truly an event when emotion breaks free and does its thing. And it often is in complete isolation from a triggering event. I sometimes cry weeks or months after something has disturbed me...it's simply a long way up to my lacrimal glands, I guess. All in all, I have come to scrap most of the chapters of the said Family Way on the subject of Emotion, so I am charged with the weighty duty of writing some new content, and so I am pondering all this, for research.

I was a little worried a several weeks back when I realised that over a period of months only two things had brought me to tears, one which seemed very reasonable, the other dissonant. The reason it (not crying for so long) worried me was that I could feel myself diving beneath the surface waters of my life -- churn, churn, churn -- to greater depths where the water is calmer, more quiescent, but not necessarily safer (sharks and scary stuff lurk there). Watching The Hiding Place was the first thing that brought everything to a halt, which seemed wholly reasonable. The second was when I thought I had broken my beloved short wave radio. Yes, true. I sat down on my bed, clutching my radio, and wept.

My little Sangean has taken on a life of its own. It travels with me, sits on my bedside table, talks to me in the shower, wakes me up in the morning. It's not that I listen to my radio an inordinate number of hours, it's just that it's there, as so few things have been these last few years. And during a tremendously difficult time, when I felt the world closing in on me, it was there, with its shortwave capability, reminding me that the world was expansive yet, and open, so much left to touch and learn of. Because sleep was eluding me then, I would lie in my loft at night, up near the ceiling, where I could study the texture of the anaglypta and look for cracks, and I would turn on my radio. Softly, voices spoke in the night. They spoke to me in tongues...ones I knew and others that I didn't. They ran over me, through me, taking my mind to far off places and peoples, and so I could sleep. Like a lullaby, like a bedtime story.

Lately, I have all sorts of data to collect....ridiculous moments -- catching myself tearing up watching a Hallmark advert (so NOT me!), crying in my dreams because I keep getting lost and can't find my way back to Centre Station, crying because someone who has rarely been able to show me tenderness did, and now I am reading a book that although it's a speedy read, it's got a grip on my insides in a way I cannot fully get. And I keep water-damaging the pages.

I am not sure why it's important for me to tell you this, fill you in on my research, but somehow this particular process of discovery doesn't seem to work well in the safe environment of a laboratory where all the proper controls can be placed on things...meaning its all contained and hidden and unknown. Here, out in the public place of my trusted friends, I am doing my hypothesizing and trials. I have been letting myself off the hook to try and reach grand conclusions about all this (not a very good scientist - can't stick to the rules); I just keep following these smaller insights like a trail of crumbs - to somewhere or someone I want to get to.