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From Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by David Abram:

Life’s become cheap … humans keep bashing each other in ever more creative ways … searing the land and spattering it with blood. An addled and anesthetized numbness is spreading rapidly throughout our species….

There are those, however, who are not frightened of grief; dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein a necessary elixir to the numbness. When they encounter one another, when they press their foreheads against the bark of a centuries-old tree, or their palms into the hand of yet another child who has tasted prematurely of wrenching loss, their eyes well with tears that fall easily to the ground. The soil needs this water….

Grief is but a gate, and our tears a kind of key opening a place of wonder that’s been locked away. Suddenly we notice the sustaining resonance between the drumming heart within our chest and the pulse rising from under the ground….