Cry Baby Boy

03 Oct, 2025

Ironically after writing a whole post last week meditating on not-crying, I've cried several times this week. This crying feels both very similar and very different from how it used to. This week I'm proudly giving myself the Cry Baby Boy ¹ award and thinking of this post as "Part 2" to last week's.

Some of the crying this week happened in Yom Kippur services when something someone said resonated with me and touched something deep inside me. Those tears were generally a misty welling up of the eyes, and felt like a true and sudden experience of encountering material from outside myself that touched right into material inside myself. I feel grateful to be able to be suddenly wrested from my own resistance and made fluid.

I also cried listening to Chance's new album Star Line. Especially the song Just A Drop which is the soundtrack to this post. When I'm crying like that, it feels like the water connects my heart and my gut. My gut is so scared, and my heart is so angry and that water is full of love.

I cried worrying about my partner, and I cried furious our dreams are made of the smallest things that are actually the biggest things. That we have entire movements just so we can have water. I cried in rage that being a teacher in America is such a dangerous job when it should actually be the cutest job ² where you learn and grow with young people. I cried about repression, about making hard choices to stay with the things and people and roles we care about while the world narrows.

I cried and cried sitting in the Days of Awe ³ in the portal between times -- between life and death. I cried enough that by the time I actually got to the Yom Kippur service, I was in a still gaze staring towards the veil. I was hungry, tired, dried out.

Heart, gut, water. I'm already finding new materials in this body. On Yom Kippur I spent time in a somatics workshop, and noticed that I could actually feel purpose in my gut -- an area of my body that I've historically been unable to feel at all.

Then today, the day after Yom Kippur, with the gates closed and the holy season topped off, I cried again. I cried through a smile like a sweet baby boy listening to Paramore just like I used to when I was 16.

When we fell asleep after the ritual last night, my partner lying next to me told me she'd been thinking about me a lot during her reflections on the holiday. She said that it might be corny, but that the song Still Into You by Paramore makes her think of me. So on my drive to my studio today I put it on and immediately started crying when the chorus hit which spread a grin across my face. I love that I'm in my 30's still crying to things that would have made me cry at 16. I love the feeling of making contact with baby parts of myself, tender little guys. The way that feeling loved and seen can make a smile cry.