Cry All You Want

I was look­ing over my jour­nal from my trip to Peru’s Ama­zon in April, and saw an entry about a dream I had. I remem­ber how strongly this dream touched me. I find the Ama­zon to be a very pow­er­ful sacred place, and I tend to dream very vividly when I’m down there. I found this dream touched some­thing really deep within me, and the feed­back I’ve received by shar­ing per­son­ally has really meant a lot to me. Here you go, a bit more broadly this time. I hope you enjoy…

I have this thing at work (I explain com­plex tech­nol­ogy to peo­ple who aren’t so com­plex) about the words we use, and the impor­tance of choos­ing our words care­fully. I’ve blogged about it long before this dream, here and here.

In my dream, I was with a lit­tle girl of about 8 or 9, and it had the feel­ing of a father/daughter (I have no chil­dren of my own) or uncle/neice (a cou­ple of these), or even that of a close rela­tion­ship with a friend’s child (tons of these!). She was cry­ing hav­ing scraped her knee.

My ini­tial reac­tion was to say “don’t cry,” but I was shown those are the wrong words. I was shown why.

We tell our chil­dren not to cry, and that’s what they do. They don’t cry. They hold it in, and teach them­selves that cry­ing is bad and deny them­selves the nat­ural relief that cry­ing brings. What we really mean is, I wish you weren’t hurt so that you wouldn’t need to cry, which of course is the case.

Instead of telling her not to cry, I then reached out, and cupped her tears in my hand, and told her little-girl-tears are the most pre­cious kind, more pre­cious than dia­monds. Each one spe­cial. I took her tears and wiped them on my face, feel­ing the tears become a part of me through my pores. I told her each time she cried, I’d be there for a glimpse, a touch, of those pre­cious tears. I explained that I wished she didn’t hurt, but that it was good to cry.

Then I saw this same lit­tle girl as a grown woman, going through hard­ships in her life, and cry­ing. Know­ing she could cry, know­ing she could release the feel­ings instead of hold­ing onto them was beau­ti­ful and I knew she was whole as a result.

Not really sure the beauty of the moment is com­ing across here, and I have no idea why I was pre­sented this very touch­ing vignette (pos­si­bly because I under­stand it, maybe I need a reminder?), but, I feel the need to share it.