Our Tears

Every breath you take is your path, and every step. While walking each step leaves home, it lifts from the ground, from a sense of being grounded, and then it arrives home again. The breath is also like this. You have to leave home, in order to find home. Home can’t be separated from this moment, from who you are.

In India, one of the holiest gestures is to take water from the Ganges, in an act that recognizes this separation, then pours the water back again. Crying is like this. Your tears fall from your individual griefs, but it comes from the grief we all have, of living in these frail, impermanent bodies. Of watching our friends die.

Our friends are the Ganges and in their death we draw them up out of the river, and let them mark us, before we put them back into the river again. Your tears flow down every drain, into the St. Lawrence River, back into the ocean and the mouth of a whale.

They belong to everyone.

Adapted from Michael’s How We Love Each Other dharma talk. More of Michael’s work can be read here.

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Editor: Kate Bartolotta