JOAN SUTHERLAND 99
of the buddha of grief, learning its contours. Over time, she discov-
ers a kind of grace in that dark, with grief as her companion: a deep
humility, a deep stillness, a deep listening.
In its Latin roots, grieving is related to being pregnant.
One day the woman hears the cry of a deer from a nearby stream.
“Where is the deer?” the teacher asks. She listens, concentrated, ripe
with something. “Who is listening?” The ripe thing bursts in her; the
deer’s cry echoes through the trees and rises simultaneously from her
own scarred heart. She is there, cloven hooves wet, and she is here,
wondering—and everything is listening to everything.
Later she is at the stream with a lacquer bucket meant for flowers,
only she fills it with water. She sees the moon’s reflection in the
water: her grief radiant. Later still, she says, the bottom falls out
of her bucket: water and light soaking into the earth. All that wet:
the stream, the watery moon in a bucket, the deer’s moist eye, the
woman weeping.
Her tears become a solvent for what is unyielding within, the
defenses we erect to keep from feeling the pain of life all the way
through—which also keep us from feeling its beauty all the way
through. The tears soften, unstick, breach, topple, and fill. They run
like water under the ice, and suddenly the frozen is flowing again.
Some people fear this kind of dissolving. Will I still be me? Will
I disappear or go mad? Will I be able to fight climate change? If we
begin this weeping, if we open ourselves to the pain and the poign-
ancy and the terrible, wounded beauty of life on this Earth, perhaps
we won’t be able to stop, and we will drown.
We do not disappear, nor do we drown. Neither do we cry for-
ever. But if from time to time these tears are called from us, they’re
no longer frightening; they are a small ceremony keeping us close
to the world. They make us less brittle, more resilient. We weep
because something is pouring in and we’re overflowing, because it is
impossible to say anything in some moments and it is equally impos-
sible not to offer something back. The salt tears are remnants of
our oceanic beginnings, and they are also the residue of the difficult