Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.
Interpretation
Tears can be a source of healing and transformation, leading us to better places emotionally and spiritually.
In this quote, Clarissa Pinkola Estes uses the metaphor of tears as a river, suggesting that emotional pain and grief can serve a purpose. While tears may be a sign of sadness, they have the potential to facilitate a journey towards healing and renewal, guiding us away from the struggles we face and toward a more hopeful future.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming adversity.
Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation- in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.
Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success.
Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.
There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.
To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.
That is what the intuition is for: it is the direct messenger of the soul.
But I think this: that whatever prices I've paid, whatever sorrows I shoulder, well, I have blessings, too. Not just my family now, but the others-the ones who have died...They're with me still. They're here...
No, you never get any fun_x000D_ _x000D_ Out of the things you haven't done.
I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.
The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle.
How we come into this world, how we are ushered in, met, and hopefully embraced upon arrival, impacts the whole of our time on earth.
To live without loving is not really to live.
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