Cry Day(s)

January 7, 2016. We’re a week into the ‘new’ year and I’ve yet to map out my goal-for-the-year chart…or have that major long-winded write in my journal to re-set my energy and focus…

The sun is out, I can feel the sun shining.

And yet, there’s a heaviness on my chest.

Today is a cry day.

I have these, do you?

The days when you’re drawn to sad films, sad books, sad music. When bed and the sleep it welcomes is the place you want to be the most (with your sad films, books and music close by). I watched the film ‘Miss You Already’ starring Drew Barrymore and Toni Collette. Wow. I cried and cried. But I wanted to.

If I stand back and look at what’s surrounding me…there are a few things that are truly challenging me. Enough to put a heaviness on my chest. Enough to motivate the tears to flow. And so I’m letting this happen. I’m following my heart and body’s instinct to shift inward and let out the tearful feelings that need to come out.

I’ve been here before. Feeling a cocktail of overwhelmed, worried and sad…and so I give myself the time and space to indulge these feelings and get to the root of them. Even when they’re seemingly caused by something out of my control. The truth is I’m realizing that feeling in control/being in control are ways of being that I instinctively reach for. And it’s not always possible nor is it not always necessary to be in control. I’m learning how to deal with the reality of this.

What’s helping? Reading poetry. I read 84 books of poetry over the holidays. Yeah, I wrote 84. I’m on the jury for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award,(read about Pat Lowther here) a pretty major award the League of Canadian Poets gives each year (I haven’t won it…but what an honour that would be!), and so part of my jury duty is to read all the books that submitted. Reading so many fine poems has strengthened my love of poetry and my core belief that poetry and literary arts are truly necessary for human existence to be positive and worth-while. Poetry is from and for the soul.

I’m still editing my own poetry for my forthcoming book (out this fall!), and this is both a challenge and a joy.

And now…opening a first-by-my-hand-opened copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Colossus (and I have to thank Patti Smith and her poetic voice in M Train for connecting me with Sylvia..and a deep craving for coffee)  I share this stanza with you:

Night, I squat in the cornucopia

Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-colour.

The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.

My hours are married to shadow.

No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel

On the blank stones of the landing. 

Such words, the sounds, the placement, the meaning…pull the tears out of my eyes like a worm from the moist soil in the beak of a mother bird.

Sigh.

Days like this I want to read and read and cry and cry. At the end of it, it will make me feel better – even if only a soul-level.

Being a mother is difficult. Many days I don’t know what I’m doing and if even in the not-knowing I’m doing it right or wrong. Though my heart knows it’s not about right and wrong, but love.

I pulled an angel card for guidance…

and smiled at the message.

I think on these days, I feel my humanity so deeply it both frightens and builds me equally.

And so I take to the page (paper or virtual) and write.

This is being a mother. This is being a writer. This is being human.

Some days, it’s all worth crying about.