"He hears inside himself the words, 'Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears' and suddenly he gets down on all fours and kisses the earth with his lips, and when he gets up, he's no longer a teary wreck of a boy but a 'champion,' Dostoevsky writes-some kind of crazy champion and hero."(F. Buechner "Listening to Your Life" p. 165)
Buechner's reflection is on a scene from the Brothers Karamazov. I may have read the book in my high school World Literature Class at Metuchen High School, I just don't remember. But I can picture the scene. The character awakes from a dream that he has at a funeral and runs out of that place filled with joy because of the dream, and moves away from his grief and disappointment to a different way of being.
Tears of joy. I think the last time I shed those was when my son won his first varsity wrestling match. I hope I was just happy for him. Somehow I'm sure there was that part of me that was reliving my lack of sports success, but recalling how good that first win felt, and how it made me want to continue.
Tears of joy, when something just goes so superbly right that the very thing you were ready to quit on, you decide to keep going. Who knows why. A dream perhaps? Just an ah-ha moment? Or that small dose of something coming from somewhere that reminds you why you started this in the first place.
Here's hoping for more tears of joy in one's life. Certainly we have enough of the other kind.
Blessings,
Ed
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