I Am Tracing Your Tears

On burns, broken hearts & learning to love the whole world.

I cry these days and I don’t know why. I think my grief lost its mind. My head stumbles around looking for a drifting body.

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I don’t know anything. Neither do you. At least let’s be honest about that much.

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Yesterday I drove to Long Beach for a limpia from my auntie Milagros. After we opened my chakras, I cried and cried and cried. She held my body with such a strong grip and soft voice:

“Who hurt you?” she whispered and shook truth from me.

Who hurt you

I think most of us wait our whole lives to be asked that.

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I don’t think the body my head searches for is even mine.

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Late at night I scribbled over the back of my hand a note to remember in the morning: Buddha compassion

I’ve written notes on my hands countless times (adhd life). But there was something about the pen wobbling the word ‘compassion’ over cigarette scars that suddenly singed me again.

I usually don’t notice my scars. But memory comes back to us in small moments such as these. Not all gifts have bows. Sometimes they’re wrapped like fallen heads. Finding a body. Feeling it’s tears. For the very first last time.

Have you ever grieved over a body?

How about your own?

Over the ways I used to use myself as an ashtray.

Who taught you that?

Who hurt you?

Who shows us how to hold a body again that took the language of a heart with no tongue.

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Compassion in Buddhism is called karuna. But this type of compassion is beyond what we know as sympathy, empathy or any basic graspable conceptions of feeling another’s pain. Karuna is a deeply divine and universal compassion to free all beings from suffering.

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It was not the first time I’ve cried over my hands. I used to cry over them all the time. The years were long when I could not look at my palms without remembering the small death inside them.

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Who hurt you?

We don’t have to tell the whole story.

Sometimes a single name sets us free.

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My cigarette scars remind me of snow angels.

Cold white sunken rounds like wings in fresh snow.

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Release your fear, Milagros said into my palms.

In that moment my fear revealed itself.

And it was not the old tale I carried around called ‘dying alone’

But the story of a heart terrified to open again.

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Angels have kissed my hands.

My hands have kissed yours.

Did you feel them?

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My auntie Rosie says, to have bravery you must do an act of courage with knees wobbling.

Does my heart have knees? Do they wobble?

Yes. Yes. Yes they do. My heart wobbles with the fear of a child who lost a child who lost a mother who must now have the courage to let all the mothers and children come back for them.

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After the limpia we sat down, one candle lit, sage burning, my hands vibrating with Milagros’s medicine, her drum’s heartbeat in mine. I don’t remember what was said first, or if anything was said at all, but she looked deeply into my eyes and said, “You can be my family, I will adopt you.”

I fell from my chair onto my knees and threw my arms around her neck like a small child.

We both burst into tears.

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Names are stories.

Names are curses.

Names are spells.

Names are prayers.

I have only one question for you:

What have you never named?

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I don’t know anything. Except maybe:

We only ever need to speak our pain once.

To someone really really listening.

To someone, who afterwards, cries with you.

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Our lives are divided into thirds: maiden, mother, crone.

I don’t know when someone goes from ‘maiden’ to ‘mother’

It certainly wasn’t when I tattooed ‘mother’ on the back of my neck in a middle of a manic episode a few years ago.

But maybe it’s when you stop praying for god to mend your broken heart and instead start praying to be made worthy of your wounds.

I turn 30 next week.

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30 is a year people make a big deal about. I wish they didn’t. I’ve never been a big birthday person. It’s so much pressure. As a double Leo I know I should like it but tbh I never know what to do on stage besides make someone laugh then run off.

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Recently while I was writing to Spirit about how lost I feel in life (cue Dark Night of the Soul over here) Spirit said to me:

The more you know yourself, the less you know god. The more you know god, the less you know yourself.

Well I must have a pretty good idea of god then lol. But for real, I’m pretty surrendered these days to realizing I don’t know shit. I feel the very moment I grip at knowing something, anything, myself no less, is the same moment it is ripped from my grasp.

That is except one thing, which I know to be unconditionally true: Love

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All I want for my birthday was something real. How easy it is to feel lost in the matrix of life and in the illusion that we are all disconnected from each other because of artificiality. How easy it is to forget something we never remembered in the first place—how the very forces of life which weave together the fabric of existence are threads which AI could never pull through it’s mighty loom: those of love and grace.

I’m far far beyond questions like what do you want for your birthday? Those questions quite literally make me laugh aloud. Because they aren’t real. I can’t feel them. Not with my hands anyway. Not with my soul.

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When will we wake up and realize all the shit we don’t take with us when we die? When will we wake up and realize the only things we leave behind when we die are love and pain?

When will we wake up and choose love?

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For my birthday I wanted something real. To feel something real with my own scarred hands. So I asked 30 friends to write letters with me to send to those incarcerated. There’s a beautiful program who sends anonymous letters to those on death row. I will send the letters in on my birthday next week.

I wasn’t even going to share about this, but here it is in these morning pages about love and compassion in a world starved of it.

I have a few more letters to write and a lifetime to go.

All I have to say is this: I cry during each letter.

Not of sorrow or pain. But of a deep deep love channeling through me I cannot describe with words.

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Another thing AI can’t do: cry.

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From my dream journal:

“There was an older man whose baby just died. The baby was very premature. I was hugging him and the hug lasted so long that he started crying. he only spoke Spanish. All I could say back in Spanish was "no lloro" no tears. He pulled back astonished and said ‘of course there are tears, my baby died’ ‘I am so sorry’ I said, realizing my poor translation, ‘What I meant to say was: I am tracing your tears’”

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Karuna. An unconditional compassion for all beings. My compassion belongs to humanity. Which means no one and nothing is excluded from my heart. I know a lot of people may not like that because they believe some people don’t deserve compassion. But that’s okay with me. Because no two hands are the same. And mine will always hold yours when you cry.

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I think the body my head searches for is yours.

Is yours.

Is mine.

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Maybe tears are nothing more than little keys.