Since the start of the year it has rained almost every day, flooding fields and paths. Repeating rain, as if the planet itself is grieving. We live in a time of heightened political polarisation and threats of war. The world is not detached from what we are doing to one another and to it

Sunt lacrimae rerum

[There are tears in the nature of things]

Virgil, Aeneid,Book I

You don’t think yourself into crying. You cry yourself, if you will allow, into daring new ways of thinking and feeling. Because tears are a form of allowing more than a willing, they lend themselves much more easily to the language of spirit...

We think [wholeness is] about returning to an original, unsullied state, when in reality the prophetic way is to pass through disorder to a new stage that does not eliminate or deny the tears of things but instead includes them at a new level.

Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage