gratitude makes me cry

Gratitude is a weird emotion. Weird good, obvs. But still weird. I was just sitting on my couch listening to a short talk by Ram Dass (don't know this dude? Scope him out. Otherwise known as Richard Alpert who go kicked out of Harvard for studying/taking/teaching certain drugs) who reminded me of a few things, one being that the world is pretty dope. (see what I just did there?). That our experience in the world is pretty dope. That the ability to live in this human realm is pretty dope. He said a lot of other stuff that kind of split my brain a bit but mostly I just had a sense of gratitude. And it made me cry.

Look. I used to cry a lot. I cried in my teens when I didn't know what was what and my immature boyfriend treated me like shit (he wasn't intentionally mean, just a bit of a dick who unfortunately hadn't yet learned how to treat women). I cried at university in churches, walking around in underground malls, and in my bedroom still unsure of what in the fuck was going on in this thing called life. In my 20s, I cried a few years into my marriage with a great dude and cried even harder for a long time after I left him. I cried in my early 30s when my dad died of a brain tumour and later when my boyfriend couldn't even admit he was my boyfriend. I cried when I moved across the ocean to try a different life and cried when the better boyfriend broke it off because of long distance. I also cried when I was sick for a long time and had no idea what was wrong with me. And I cried myriad times between and among all of these. At commercials mostly.

But I have also cried because amidst all of the suffering, perhaps even because some of it, I have encountered and been gifted many blessings. It's difficult to put into words an experience that seems to be beyond form. But I do feel gratitude in this body which is mostly made up of space but for this small argument, made up of a certain solidity. I am a Mountain, I'm a Mountain like you said to be.

Gratitude is a felt sense, a heart opening, a softening and also a little edge, the edge of the tension being released by a few tears. There's a sense of a wave to it. A heightening and then a releasing. Like an orgasm but much quieter and less sexy. Not sexy at all actually. Just lovely. A petit mort but without the clean up. It also feels like I have to quell it before it overwhelms me too much. I'm not sure why gratitude often comes with tears. I think maybe the emotion is too much for my pea-brain to handle so the crying stops me from being subsumed by the beauty of it all. There's also a tinge of guilt somehow related to the depressing fact that I often forget to be grateful, that perhaps I'm not doing enough to payback the gift of being alive. It could be pretty rad to traipse through the world grateful for all of it, all of the time. Even the hard parts. But that's the advanced class. I'm still in the first semester of the Into to Grattitude 101.