Happy Tears

Gertrude Mbetsi taking a break one day at the Mapusha studio.

I cry a lot, a musing after the school shootings in Connecticut. 

Maybe it’s genetic, as I see it in my siblings who haven’t spent near the time and energy I have uncovering and cosseting vulnerabilities. At first it was stories, books and movies that made my eyes well up and spill over with tears, then it was boys and personal pains but I find in my 7th decade more often my tears are ‘happy tears.” The phrase was coined with laugher in the weaving coop by Gertrude, the oldest, sturdiest and most outspoken of the women. She ran her fingers down her cheeks, then pointed at me, laughing, “Happy tears, you cry happy tears.” Soon all the women in the coop understood the phrase and we chuckled about it together. 

She’s right, I do. Invariably, when I hear the women singing together tears roll down my cheeks which is what Gertrude was referring to. It’s not only the beauty of their blended voices but the way they come together, sing together and the great heart I always feel in this cooperative communion. It touches me.

As far as I can tell, the women of Mapusha rarely cry themselves, not at death, not at birth not at any of the other indignities in  their lives of rural poverty. But, last year Gertrude came to me and said with a proud smile, “I cried this weekend, happy tears.”

I laughed and asked what made her cry. 

“ I watched Eulender (her 15 year old grand-daughter) running in a foot race for her school, when she passed me by I could see how hard she was trying,” she touched her chest with her hand, “ Her heart was so very strong.  I cried.”

Smiling, I nodded, I understood. 

This weekend the continual coverage of the killing of twenty first graders plus brought many tears to my eyes. I cried for what I could only imagine was a terrifying loneliness in the killer and for the shocking grief of the whole community. As the tears rolled down my cheeks, I could feel all the millions of people in these gun-filled states we live in whose eyes filled with tears this weekend. It isn’t happy tears this time but it is a sign of caring and compassion. It is a national communion, of sorts. 

I’m beyond embarrassment at my own tears whether they are the mark of a genuine sap or the response to the continued assaults on my staunch idealism or, maybe simply the stigma of caring and caring intensely. 

My prayer for this new year is for an ever stronger heart, boundaries stretched so that the well of caring grows deeper. May I shed hundreds and hundreds of tears.  

The image I hold for the world is that in this new year we increasingly join together like a gigantic youtube flash mob. More and more people becoming proclaimed members of the official network of caring and caring immensely for every blessed being and this whole world of ours. May we find a million ways for the net of our caring to be strengthened so all the pains and losses are increasingly shared, absorbed and absolved in cooperative communion.

Happy tears to all!