Tears and Collective Weeping
Should collective weeping be popularised again?
We think of tears as being part of a solitary activity. Yet traditionally crying was a public act.
Archetypally it is women that are permitted to cry publicly. In Mexican folklore, La Llorona was a vengeful ghost who wandered near bodies of water to mourn the children that she had killed in a jealous rage to spite her husband. In Southern Europe they parade statues of the crying mother of God during Holy Week. People flock to see her, touching and kissing the large statue as it is perilously carried through narrow streets. Our Lady of the Sorrows is often depicted pierced in the heart by seven swords, representing her seven great sorrows.
Have you ever cried so much you had no idea what you were weeping for?
Have you ever cried on behalf of someone else?
I once met a special person. We bonded over poetry, the Spanish language and being away from loved ones. We talked about the difficulty of saying goodbye; how to miss people. Through these conversations I realised that I’d taught myself to stop missing people. At some point I even stopped saying goodbye to the people that I had shared a profound connection with. I reasoned to myself that saying goodbye was too final. You would never know if you would see that…
